“The best thing about Beverle Graves Myers’ riveting first mystery, which involves the poisoning of a beautiful, aging opera star and the charging of Ravello with the crime, is how quickly we slip into the world she has so expertly re-created, despite its distance and initial oddness. It’s a world where castrati-bashing by gangs of louts on the street (and verbal insults by solid citizens behind closed doors) is a fact of life, where a government would rather have fast action than slow truth, where a powerful businessman buys and sells people along with his other trade goods.”

“Beverle Graves Myers brings eighteenth-century Venice shimmering to life in this fast-paced and unsettling mytery that boasts atmosphere, layers of intrigue and, in Tito Amato, a most compelling protagonist. A virtuoso debut.” 

“Myers’s absorbing first novel, a historical set in eighteenth-century Italy, introduces a most unusual hero, Tito Amato, who was sold as a child to be castrated and taught to be an opera singer…Readers familiar with Venice will delight in following Tito through the calli and campi where masked revelers celebrate the Carnivale. (One patrician lady uses a seduction technique that might be useful today.) The complicated plot has twists enough for a nineteenth-century opera, but Myers neatly ties all the pieces together by the end.”