A Captain Natalia Monte Investigation Series

Jan Merete Weiss’s Italy comes to life as Captain Natalia Monte of the Naples Carabiniere returns to investigate a murder committed at the heart of the great city’s art community.

When the bodies of two men are found, shockingly posed, in the garden of an elderly countess, Captain Natalia Monte of the Carabiniere is assigned the case. Soon she finds herself shuttling between Naples’s decadent art galleries and violent criminal underworld. If she is to succeed in solving the heinous crime, Natalia must deal with not only her own complicated past and allegiances, but also those of the city as a whole. A riveting and poetic exploration of the violence that lurks in the heart of beauty.

When a beautiful college student is found murdered in the catacombs beneath a monastary, Captain Natalia Monte of the Carabinieri is assigned to investigate. Could the killer be a professor the student had been sleeping with? A blind monk who loved her? Or perhaps a member of the brutal Napali criminal organization, the Camorra? As Natalia pursues her investigation, the crime families of Naples go to war over garbage-hauling contracts; and all across the city heaps of trash pile up, uncollected. When one of Natalia’s childhood friends is caught up in the violence, her loyalties are tested, and each move she makes threatens her own life and the lives of those she loves.

“When Jan Merete Weiss’s Captain Natalia Monte investigates the murder of a beautiful young university student, she must thread an uneasy path between childhood loyalties, religious superstition, corrupt officials, growing piles of garbage, and warring factions of an entrenched Camorra.  Weiss has done her homework, walked the pestilent streets, prowled the catacombs below the city, and created a thoroughly human woman who will do what she must to protect her part of a city that both enchants and infuriates her.” —Margaret Maron, author of the Judge Deborah Knott series

When a beautiful college student is found murdered in the catacombs beneath a monastery, Captain Natalia Monte of the Carabinieri is assigned to investigate. Could the killer be a professor the student had been sleeping with? A blind monk who loved her? Or perhaps a member of the brutal Napali criminal organization, the Camorra? As Natalia pursues her investigation, the crime families of Naples go to war over garbage-hauling contracts; and all across the city heaps of trash pile up, uncollected. When one of Natalia’s childhood friends is caught up in the violence, her loyalties are tested, and each move she makes threatens her own life and the lives of those she loves.