David Gee, Lillian and the Italians (The Conrad Press 2021)
Leaving her strait-laced semi-detached life in Hastings, recently widowed Lillian travels to Venice in search of her estranged son, interior designer, Andrew.
From the railings of vaporettos, she drinks in the glamour of the Grand Canal, the Bridge of Sighs and the Piazza de San Marcos, and tries to ignore the stink. Venice haunts her, remembering the honeymoon she shared here with Andrew’s father, 30-some years ago.
She begins to encounter some of the people of importance in her son’s life, and the puzzle pieces start to fall in place. She learns more about his Jet Setting lifestyle. She learns a secret, which she can’t understand why he never shared with her. Once, she had believed they were close.
She fingers the scant postcards they’d received over the years. What had he been doing in Cortina? What took him to Rome? All left no return address.
Lillian is hosted at the sumptuous villa on the Amalfi Riviera of a handsome Sicilian prince, who has some secrets of his own to reveal. While they wait for news of Andrew, the prince escorts Lillian to Capri by yacht, to Rome by private plane.
Into the mix we add a murder mystery, involving, provocatively, ‘Corsicans’—Andrew is presumably on holiday in Corsica– and Lillian’s anxiety increases. Thence reignites an ancient feud between Corsican and Sicilian criminal clans, and we are left with assorted love children from complicated liaisons.
This is a great tale, beautifully written, featuring loads of local colour and a window into the glamorous, sometimes dysfunctional and sometimes dangerous, lifestyles of those who jet and yacht across the Mediterranean from villa to villa. The characters are interesting, and the pace is good. We hear the story of the prodigal Andrew in dribs and drabs, leaving us ever keen to read the next chapter.
My only slight niggle was that I found the couple in the love story a bit of an unlikely pairing. But, Love is not necessarily rational.
Susie Helme 
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