- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Soho Press Inc (7 Jun 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1569474591
- ISBN-13: 978-1569474594
- Product Dimensions: 13.6 x 2.9 x 19.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,352,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Last Enemy: Commissario Cenni Series, Book 1
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Rita grew up in Brooklyn, the only child of a narcissistic Italian mother and the GI she married at the end of World War II. After her mother’s death, she quits her teaching job and descends upon her poor but aristocratic relatives, the Count and Countess Casati, in Assisi. It takes a while before they realize, to their chagrin, that Rita has come to stay. When the family assembles to watch the penitentes procession in the town square during Easter Week, a Casati tradition, Rita does not join them as planned. Her corpse is later found in the family mausoleum.
Alessandro Cenni, a commissario in the State Police of Umbria, and a handsome bachelor whose twin brother is about to become a bishop, must penetrate the secrets of the Casati family and their circle if he is to discover who killed Rita and why. But he is blocked by their powerful right-wing connections, and by a superior who prefers to arrest a scapegoat rather than risk political suicide. Aided by a loyal staff in his quest for that rarity—justice—he still must acknowledge that no one can defeat the last enemy, death itself.
Grace Brophy grew up in Queens, New York. She now divides her time between New York and Terni, a village in Umbria, where she lives with her husband, a Uruguayan artist. This is the first in the Commissario Cenni series of investigations set in Italy.
Alessandro Cenni, a commissario in the State Police of Umbria, and a handsome bachelor whose twin brother is about to become a bishop, must penetrate the secrets of the Casati family and their circle if he is to discover who killed Rita and why. But he is blocked by their powerful right-wing connections, and by a superior who prefers to arrest a scapegoat rather than risk political suicide. Aided by a loyal staff in his quest for that rarity—justice—he still must acknowledge that no one can defeat the last enemy, death itself.
Grace Brophy grew up in Queens, New York. She now divides her time between New York and Terni, a village in Umbria, where she lives with her husband, a Uruguayan artist. This is the first in the Commissario Cenni series of investigations set in Italy.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Ms Brophy has written an unusual who dunnit. This is my first meeting with Commissario Cenni but I shall meet him again in another book by Ms Brophy.
After half a lifetime of supporting her self-centred mother, the mother's death leaves Rita Minelli unexpectedly well-off from monies left by her father and hidden by her mother. Rita had loved a childhood interlude spent with her mother's pretentious family in Assisi. She sells up and moves there, living unwanted and unloved in the old family home.
The story includes a few locals, a few immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the Inspector Cenni called to a homicide during Assisi's religious fervour on Good Friday, and running behind everything the corrupt Italian way of getting things done - or ignored. Surfaces cover, sometimes imperfectly, other layers. Cenni detects with varying results but Ms Brophy brings everything together with skill so that we understand the motivations as well as the actions of our main characters.
I think my personal complaint might be that not enough of the Italian scenery is put on the pages although there is certainly sufficient town and passing landscape for the book's plot but then I fell in love with Italy on my first visit there.
After half a lifetime of supporting her self-centred mother, the mother's death leaves Rita Minelli unexpectedly well-off from monies left by her father and hidden by her mother. Rita had loved a childhood interlude spent with her mother's pretentious family in Assisi. She sells up and moves there, living unwanted and unloved in the old family home.
The story includes a few locals, a few immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the Inspector Cenni called to a homicide during Assisi's religious fervour on Good Friday, and running behind everything the corrupt Italian way of getting things done - or ignored. Surfaces cover, sometimes imperfectly, other layers. Cenni detects with varying results but Ms Brophy brings everything together with skill so that we understand the motivations as well as the actions of our main characters.
I think my personal complaint might be that not enough of the Italian scenery is put on the pages although there is certainly sufficient town and passing landscape for the book's plot but then I fell in love with Italy on my first visit there.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I feel obliged to warn anyone who might be swayed by the previous 2 reviews that someone who loves Donna Leon and Magdalen Nabb is likely to be deeply disappointed in this author, at least as revealed in this book. Not only does she feel obliged to telegraph future developments all the time, and to tell readers how wonderful Commisario Cenni is, just in case we don't get it, but her prose is wooden, none of her characters seems to have any inner life - AND, she seems to be convinced that a "super strata" is some sort of highway (might have put it down to a typo - but it is systematic)!
One of the reviews on the back claims it is an "Italian HISTORICAL police procedural", which seems to me to confirm that the people who write these things don't actually read them. I managed to do so but will not be buying anything by this author again.
One of the reviews on the back claims it is an "Italian HISTORICAL police procedural", which seems to me to confirm that the people who write these things don't actually read them. I managed to do so but will not be buying anything by this author again.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Last Enemy, The What a find for a fan of Leon's Commissario Brunetti. Assissi instead of Venice, but Politics in the Italian State against a most honorable police Inspector
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