Cruel Music

June 12, 2006
Myers's third mystery to feature soprano Tito Amato, a renowned castrato in 18th-century Italy, gets off to a slow start, but the pace soon picks up. Tito finds himself in Rome, singing in the house of Cardinal Lorenzo Fabiani. Chez Fabiani is abuzz with papal politics—Pope Clement XII's on his deathbed, and the two men most likely to replace him need Fabiani's support if they are to prevail. When Fabiani's mother's maid turns up strangled in Fabiani's garden, Fabiani covers up the crime, but Tito, worried he'll be falsely implicated should the corpse come to light, decides to get to the bottom of things. His investigation leads him into fascinating Roman subcultures—communities of goddess worshipers, who practice ancient paganism right under the church's nose, and church leaders who are more interested in natural science than theology. Myers (Interrupted Aria
) litters the book with coy references to the castrato's surprising sex life, but leaves the details to the reader's imagination.