In Valdoro, beauty is part of the disguise.

The Valdoro Mysteries follow Kate Marlowe, a widowed former cultural attaché who inherits a house in a fictional village in the Prosecco hills. She expects quiet mornings, village rhythms, food, wine, and time to write. Instead, she discovers that Valdoro is very good at preserving what everyone knows but no one says.

Kate’s knowledge of art, language, objects, ceremony, records, and social display gives her an unusual way into crime. She notices what others overlook: an altered photograph, an old vineyard map, a family object, a public omission, a room arranged to tell the wrong story.

Each book offers a satisfying mystery, a return to Valdoro’s piazza, vineyards, bar, market, church, Comune, food, wine, and recurring cast, and one old secret beneath the present crime.

A Death in Valdoro

Book One in The Valdoro Mysteries

When Lorenzo Bressan, a respected vineyard owner, is found dead near the boundary of an old parcel of land, Valdoro settles quickly on the easiest explanation: his American wife must have killed him.

She says she did not.
The village thinks she did.
Kate Marlowe is not so sure.

Newly arrived after inheriting an old family house, Kate has no intention of involving herself in a murder investigation. But the speed with which the village arranges its story troubles her. Lorenzo is remembered as generous, successful, and patient. His foreign wife is described as difficult, unhappy, insufficiently grateful, and not quite trustworthy.

The evidence against her begins to look persuasive, but Kate notices that the story depends on more than facts. It depends on what Valdoro is willing to believe.

As Kate looks more closely, the murder leads away from a simple domestic explanation and into the history of the vineyards themselves. During the conversion to glera, the grape at the center of Prosecco production, land was rearranged, records were simplified, and one family’s prosperity may have been built on another family’s loss.

Someone used the vineyard conversion to steal land. Lorenzo knew. And someone killed him before the old theft could be exposed.

To understand what happened, Kate must learn how Valdoro protects itself: through gossip, silence, hospitality, documents, old loyalties, and beautiful things arranged to tell false stories.

A Death in Valdoro introduces Kate Marlowe, the village of Valdoro, and the hidden arrangements beneath vineyard prosperity, family reputation, and old village manners.

The series continues

Each Valdoro mystery returns to the same village world: morning coffee at the bar, vineyard walks, market gossip, seasonal food, old houses, church records, municipal files, village comedy, and the people who know more than they admit.

Across the series, Kate’s inherited house reveals its history slowly. The villagers know more about her family than she does. Some welcome her. Some watch her. Some have reasons to keep the past exactly where it is. Each book solves one present-day mystery while opening one more door into Valdoro’s deeper memory.