The Italian Secret, Tara Moss's taut third mystery featuring Australian PI Billie Walker, takes its protagonist from the wealthy suburbs of Sydney to the bombed-out streets of Naples, Italy, as Billie wrestles with a difficult domestic violence case and searches for answers regarding her late father.
Moss (The Ghosts of Paris) begins in 1948 with a high-drama incident: a client's cheating husband threatens Billie at her office. Though more worried for her client than herself, Billie is nevertheless set on edge by his visit. Her tension grows when, sorting through her father's case files, she finds an envelope of letters from Italy that contain potentially explosive secrets. Billie books passage for herself and her mother on a cruise from Sydney to Italy, hoping to find the woman who wrote those letters and her connection to Billie's father. But her Sydney case may follow her across the ocean--and the cases may be linked in ways Billie can't yet see.
Though mainly focused on Billie's two quests, Moss's narrative also touches on wartime life in Italy, taking readers into Naples's network of underground tunnels where residents built makeshift homes during World War II. Moss also explores Billie's sense of duty to her clients, the sexism she faces in her investigative work, and the tricky emotional territory she navigates as her father's Italian secret challenges what she thought she knew about his past.
Sharp and well plotted, The Italian Secret is a satisfying international adventure with a complex family story at its heart. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams