I found this book on the sidewalk and picked it up without having heard of this author or the series (this book is the third of four, but it works as a stand-alone story as well). It seemed promising—London! Italy! Intrigue! 1898!—but as I started reading, I was a little grumpy. The story opens with a gimmick, and Updale is sometimes too reliant on clichés or otherwise eye-roll-inducing language (a character is “flattened” by his wife’s death, another has “friends in high places,” at one point we hear how “the slightest flicker resonated” between two friends thinking of the same thing, at another moment we are told that someone “radiated grief from every pore”). I also felt like, more than once, characters’ emotions were over-explained: for example, in one scene one might guess from what two people are saying that the woman wishes the man were romantically interested in her, but then Updale goes and spells it out. Plus, there were a few plot points that seemed way too obvious, though possibly they’d be less so to a younger reader.
Which isn’t to say there’s nothing to like in this book. The descriptions of Florence, with its red-tiled rooftops and its river and its bridges, the shops on the Ponte Vecchio, the church bells in the morning, are pleasing and made me want to plan a trip to Italy, and I was charmed by the teenage characters, like carefree Frank and his know-it-all brother, Alex. (The latter, when Frank is talking about how good Italian bread is and wondering why there isn’t bread like this in England, answers, quite seriously, that it’s because of the uniqueness of the Italian flour.) The plot, which starts around the attempt by two men (one a former thief) to recover a stolen natural history collection but then moves wider, including, among other things, anarchism, assassination, and a strike at an ice cream factory, is interesting and has room for lots of good detail (like all the scenes at Le Specola, with its great/creepy wax anatomical models, and all the ice-cream related scenes, from getting ice from the quayside to the dirty factory kitchens).
Still: while this was a fun read, I don’t think I’m going to seek out the rest of the Montmorency books.
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