The Attic Mysteries: I Misteri delle Soffitte

The first English translation of Carolina Invernizio's lost Italian gothic thriller.Turin, carnival night. A masked woman leads a penniless student up to a garret - and a respectable man's ruin begins.Count Livio Rossano has everything: a noble name, a beautiful and devoted wife, a fortune almost within his grasp. He has built it all on other people's blood. When a cast-off mistress threatens his ambitions, he does not soil his own hands - he keeps a devoted dependent who will do anything he asks, murder included. The crime is buried, an innocent man is sent to the galleys for it, and the Count climbs higher than ever.But a dying woman's last words reach the wrong ears. A slandered countess begins, quietly, to gather proof. A shopgirl remakes herself as the most dazzling courtesan in the city to draw the truth out of the man who destroyed the one she loved. And behind the velvet drapery - intercepted letters, a slow poison, and a secret of blood - every one of them is carried toward a reckoning none will walk away from unchanged.The Attic Mysteries is Carolina Invernizio at full pitch: disguise, buried parentage, betrayal, and long-plotted revenge, moving between the lit salons and the back-stairs garrets of nineteenth-century Turin.One of the most widely read Italian novelists of her age, Invernizio wrote sensation fiction prolifically - yet almost none of it has ever appeared in English. This is the first time I Misteri delle Soffitte has been translated into English: newly rendered for a modern reader while keeping the brooding, gaslit atmosphere of the original.For readers of Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and the great Victorian novels of secrets and sensation.

Pages: 321, Paperback, Independently published