With two novels to her credit, the Italian Ilaria Tutti is one of those authors in crescendo but pending absolute confirmation. Because then cases like those of Paula hawkins that end up stagnating with no signs of a solution after having known the most famous successes. Become a Joel dicker or staying in the one or two hit wonder is just a matter of slightly lowering the bar of self-demand in the face of editorial pressures that urge news ...
But of course, in the case of Tuti, the awards confirm that good work beyond the commercial coup. And it is that if in a takeoff like the one of "Flowers on hell" it is surpassed in advance by a glorious Edgar 2021 finalist like this, we can imagine everything that can come ...
The curator Teresa Battaglia doubts whether to continue hiding from her team the disease that is affecting her memory, when she receives a call from an art gallery: a portrait of enormous value has been found attributed to a cult painter, Alessio Andrian, whose eleventh and last work was believed lost.
The painting, however, has a detail that overshadows the discovery: the red paint that draws the face of a young woman is actually human blood and, according to the chromatic analysis, the artist's brush was soaked in a heart that was still beating.
Teresa and her team have to find out what happened in 1945, the year the painting was painted, when the author was hiding in the woods near the border between Italy and Yugoslavia fleeing from the Nazis. Battaglia, with increasingly fragile health, must rely on the help of her collaborator Massimo Marini, but soon she will realize that she is not the only one hiding an unspeakable secret.
You can now buy the novel "The Black Virgin" by Ilaria Tuti, here:
