Vaporetto 13 A Novel

Venice is echoing with the voices of all its old ghosts. Beneath the city's exterior beauty -- sun-streaked canals, charming gondolas, and splendid piazzas -- is a world of bone-chilling cold, dank alleyways, and a tradition that marks a Holiday of Death. Cloaks and masks, disguise and intrigue, are a time-honored way of life in this familiar yet unknowable city in which Jack Squire, a currency trader on assignment from Washington, D.C., has taken up residence. On one particular autumn night, swirling with damp mist and moving shadows, Jack finds himself in a campo teeming with stray cats. There he meets Caterina, a woman bearing the sadness of centuries, whose strangeness immediately possesses him and whose past eludes and controls him. "Vaporetto 13" is the relentless and mesmerizing story of one man's search for truth and the haunted city in which he finds it.