Christobel Kent Books In Order

Sandro Cellini Books In Publication Order

The Drowning River (2009)
A Murder in Tuscany (2010)
The Dead Season (2012)
A Darkness Descending (2013)
The Killing Room (2014)
The Viper (2020)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

A Party In San Niccolo (2003)
Late Season (2004)
The Summer House (2005)
A Florentine Revenge (2006)
The Crooked House (2015)
The Loving Husband (2016)
The Day She Disappeared (2017)
What We Did (2018)
A Secret Life (2019)
The Widower (2020)

Sandro Cellini Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Christobel Kent Books Overview

The Drowning River

Meet Sandro Cellini, Florence’s answer to Donna Leon s Guido Brunetti. One wet November in Florence, the grieving widow of an eminent Jewish architect comes to visit Sandro Cellini, good husband, disgraced ex policeman, and recently turned PI, to ask him to investigate her husband s suicide. Cellini takes her on out of sympathy, although this first case makes a downbeat start to his new career. There seems no doubt that Claudio Gentileschi, a Holocaust survivor and lifelong depressive found drowned on a bleak stretch of the River Arno, did take his own life, and initially Cellini imagines that his only duty is to support the widow through her time of mourning. But as Cellini doggedly retraces the architect s last hours through the worst rains since the devastating floods of 1966, a young Englishwoman is found to have gone missing from the city s community of hard drinking, high living art students, and Sandro s search turns abruptly into something grimmer and more urgent than he could have imagined, as he uncovers a network of greed and corruption that is hidden under a veneer of tradition and refinement. The Drowning River is a spot on, atmospheric new mystery, the first in a series featuring Cellini.

A Party In San Niccolo

An entrancing story that is one of the most absorbing examinations of the English in Italy since A Room With A View. Set during one week in springtime Florence, A Party In San Niccolo follows the events leading up to the seventy fifth birthday party for Frances Richardson, a much loved English resident. Around her, Frances’ friends are gearing up for the party too: Frank, a disenchanted journalist; Jane, who runs an Italian cookery school for rich Home Counties wives; her shady husband Niccolo; and Gina, a beleaguered mother of three who has come to Florence for a break. Before the week is out love, death, family secrets and old memories will come to a head at Frances’ party, with dramatic results…

Late Season

‘Suddenly, she felt the thrill of being in so foreign a place, far more foreign that she had expected; a place where anything might happen…
‘ The restored Tuscan farmhouse on the edge of an ancient wood is the perfect setting for a late September holiday. As Justine Elliott, her friends and their families from university gather to relax and unwind, she hopes it will be a chance to put the most tragic events of the previous year behind them all. However, the apparently peaceful Italian countryside holds as many secrets as its visitors and, before the week is out, the past and the present will collide, with unexpected and dramatic results…

The Summer House

Rose Fell’s friends think she’s taking a big risk when she leaves the security of home and career to move to the beautiful but isolated village of Grosso, near Genoa. But after a year of emotional turmoil Rose no longer has any ties back home, and she relishes the challenges of a new start. Making a home, however, in the ravishing, haunted landscape of Italy’s Riviera coast, turns out to be lonelier than Rose had anticipated. And it is only when she is asked to write a profile of one of her reclusive neighbours, the once glamorous film star Elvira Vitale, that Rose feels her new life is really beginning. But when a young girl’s body is found on the local beach, and the following day Elvira’s hardworking migrant cleaner, Ania, goes missing, Rose finds herself embroiled in a murder investigation that threatens the idyll she has worked so hard to establish.

A Florentine Revenge

Celia lives and works in Florence as a tour guide and thinks the forthcoming birthday celebrations for the young wife of wealthy businessman Lucas Marsh, will bring the usual mix of museums, galleries and exclusive shopping. But, in the cold December weather a man’s body is found in a disused swimming pool a man who 15 years earlier was the chief suspect in an enquiry into the death of a six year old English girl. As Celia’s working weekend progresses, she finds she is by no means alone in remembering the gruesome details of that terrible murder, and she and her companions seem unwittingly to get embroiled further and further into the mysteries surrounding a 15 year old grievance, and a very current murder.