The Pindar Diamond

May 10, 2010
In Hickman's coincidence-heavy latest (after The Aviary Gate), Paul Pindar, a 17th-century English merchant working in Venice, is obsessed with the Sultan's Blue, a 322-carat diamond coveted by every collector in the plague-ravaged city. Pindar, broke from drinking and gambling, needs the diamond to ransom his captive love from a sultan's harem. Intertwined with his story are those of Sister Annetta, a convent novitiate who alone knows how the Sultan's Blue came to Venice, and Maryam, an acrobat charged with escorting a crippled mute and her deformed newborn (who might be a mermaid) to Venice. When Pindar learns that the Sultan's Blue will be the prize in a high-stakes card game, he desperately tries to scheme his way to the table, going against warnings from fellow traders Ambrose Smith, a covert intelligencer, and John Carew, a friend with his own secret. Though the narrative moves from Pindar to Annetta to Maryam in a frustratingly helter-skelter fashion, Hickman provides a convincing portrait of a troubled Venice that will tide readers over until the story elements click into place just in time for a series of satisfying resolutions.

July 1, 2010

Masks, courtesans, nefarious plots, plague--Hickman's (The Aviary Gate, 2008, etc.) panorama of early-17th-century Venice has it all.

It's 1604 and Venice is awash in rumors about the Sultan's Blue, a dazzling diamond of 100-plus carats, reputedly stolen from the Ottoman Padushah. Gaming impresario Zuanne Memmo is organizing the Venice equivalent of a marathon game of high-stakes poker, at which the participants deposit all they have--in advance--to play to win the fist-sized gem. English merchant Paul Pindar wants in--he's been bankrupted by too many despairing binges after his betrothed, Celia Lamprey, was kidnapped by pirates and sold into the harem of the very same Padushah in Constantinople. She was, he thinks, killed in an escape attempt. Celia's fellow captive Annetta met a better fate--richly rewarded for her service to the Sultan's mother, she's returned in triumph to the Venetian convent were she was once a lowly servant-nun. As Pindar squabbles with his rebellious valet John Carew (who has a proclivity for seducing nuns) and his erstwhile employer Ambrose Jones, he of the Cyrano-sized nose and hidden agenda, another story line slouches toward Venice: An all-female troupe of tumblers and magicians, led by gentle giantess Maryam, wends its way along the coast. A smuggler, Bocelli, bribed the troupe to take in a young woman and her newborn, born with the tail of a mermaid. The mother cannot speak and appears to have been savagely beaten, her legs deliberately broken. Once in Venice, Maryam realizes that Bocelli planned to sell the newborn to Ambrose, who brokers oddities, dead or alive. Constanza, a kindly courtesan, tries to dissuade Pindar from playing for the Blue. She can't confess her love for him--that would violate the code of her profession.

The plot is as murky as the giant rock's provenance, but the supple prose invites the reader to double back for clues. The ending, though, skirts a fine line between predictability and anticlimax.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2010
Suspicion, greed, and love fuel this sequel to The Aviary Gate (2008), which resolves the inconclusive relationship at the heart of that book. In early-seventeenth-century Italy, a wandering troupe of women acrobats is persuaded to take a frail, damaged woman and her infant, whose fused legs make her seem like a mermaid, to Venice. At the same time, Englishman Paul Pindar, a merchant in Venice, is becoming increasingly addicted to gambling as he still grieves for his fianc'e, Celia Lamprey, lost long before in a shipwreck. As Pindar bets everything on a high-stakes game for the beautiful and mystical diamond known as the Sultans Blue, his servant, John Carew, whos fond of bedding young nuns at the convent across the lagoon, finds that place a source of both information and love. Hickmans well-researched, vivid portraits of seventeenth-century lifefrom the stinking Venetian canals to the threat of plague, in settings ranging from a sultans harem to a cloistered conventadd so much vigor to this historical novel that its easy to forgive the divergent plotlines and somewhat rushed wrap-up.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)