
** 1/2- The parallels were rather too close for them to be properly believable. Most disappointingly, I didn't feel like I had any idea of the motivation behind the sadistic villains in either half of the story.
Daniel Forster, a young Englishman, comes to Venice to a broken-down palazzo of misfits to help catalogue the old manuscripts left behind by the printing operation that used to operate there during the Renaissance. While digging around, he happens across an anonymous masterpiece that he is soon convinced to claim as his own - and he is drawn into a web of murder, intrigue and blackmail because of it. The story of the manuscript is told in a parallel storyline of Lorenzo Scacchi, apprenticed to his uncle's printing press, who helps a young Jewess demonstrate her talents to Vivaldi himself. But he, too, finds himself drawn into a complicated mess of love, deceit and murder.
As usual with parallel stories of this type, I thought that one of the storylines (the historical) was considerably stronger than the other. They were set apart quite effectively through the use of first person in the Renaissance section and third person in the contemporary sections. For me this added a greater immediacy (which it had at any rate) to the dangerous scenes in the historical section. By contrast, I never felt that Daniel himself was in much danger - nor did he seem particularly useful in puzzling out much - at least not in a way that helped the reader along. I just didn't care for him overmuch.
The villain in the contemporary sections was also quite obvious from very near the beginning, and the fact that there was a 'message' of sorts to be drawn from the different ways the villains were dealt with irritated me. I wasn't at all sure what the motivations of the villains were (though this was better with the historical villain than the contemporary). I just closed the book feeling rather dissatisfied with the way things played out, especially the dubious connection between the two stories near the end that just didn't seem to mesh with the rest of the story.
Lucifer's Shadow was certainly a quick read - the period detail in the historical section was very interesting. I liked following Lorenzo along the grubby canals, to the palazzos and into the Renaissance Ghetto. A scene that particularly sticks with me is when he and the girls from the Pieta orchestra go for a picnic on an island with their benefactors, and Rebecca is on a rock she deems the throne of great emperors. There were some memorable and evocative scenes, but the resolution of the thriller elements just didn't work for me.
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