In the end, the main villain was a bit obvious, but there was an interesting twist toward the end that I didn’t see coming. If you enjoy Susanna Kearsley’s books, you will probably enjoy The Tuscan Child.
And then there’s the handsome but mercurial Renzo. The subplot involving Paola Rossini, who rents a room to Joanna and teaches her about Italian cooking, is charming and heartwarming. I felt sympathy for Joanna’s predicament as well as Hugo’s. Someone who is willing to kill to keep his or her secrets. Once there, she meets Sofia’s son Renzo, but finds that the past mystery is not easily uncovered, and that someone wants it to stay buried. Intrigued and without work, she uses his legacy to travel to San Salvatore to find out what happened back in 1944.
Among his things she finds a letter to Sofia that was returned after war in which he declares his love for her and makes a cryptic reference to their “beautiful boy” being hidden. Joanna is in a bad place herself, but grateful for the small legacy Hugo left her. Then the action moves to 1973 when Joanna Langley goes back to her ancestral home to deal with her father’s sudden death. She helps him to hide in the ruins of a nearby monastery and brings him food and whatever medical supplies she can find. He is discovered by Sofia Bartoli, a young woman from the nearby village of San Salvatore. He’s the only survivor of the plane crash, but his leg is badly injured. Hugo Langley, a British pilot, is shot down over the Tuscan countryside in December of 1944. The Tuscan Child takes place alternately in 19, and the narrators are a father and his daughter. I’m a big fan of Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness series, so when I saw that she had written a “story within a story” one of my favorite literary devices, I had to buy the book.
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