Interrupted Aria by Beverle Graves Myers

Sound like any place you know?' - Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune (3.21. It's a world where castrati-bashing by gangs of louts on the street (and verbal insults by solid citizens behind closed doors) is a fact of life, where a government would rather have fast action than slowtruth, where a powerful businessman buys and sells people along with his other trade goods. The best thing about Beverle Graves Myers' riveting first mystery, which involves the poisoning of a beautiful, aging opera star and the charging of Ravello with the crime, is how quickly we slip into the world she has so expertly re-created, despite its distance and initial oddness. During his arias, all eyes were glued to his face and gestures.Some of the women, and even a few of the men, seemed transported by sensation.They appeared nothing short of enraptured.'

'I had once witnessed a virtuoso performance by the great Farnelli in Naples. 'Castrati are famous for having the small, delicately formed larynx of a woman and the prodigious lung capacity of a man,' says Tito, who is proud of his art but resentful at the price he has paid for it.

The other, his best friend, Felice Ravello, is a sadder figure: Despite the operation, his voice has cracked and thickened, and he must develop other musical skills to survive. One of them, Tito Amato, returning to his native city after many years in Naples at the famed Conservatorio San Remo, where he perfected his art, is about to become a star. 'On a chilly day in 1731, two young men arrive in the Italian city of Venice-as besieged then by nature and human frailties as the present-day version so well-chronicled by such mystery writers as Edward Sklepowich and Donna Leon.īoth of the men are castrati-singers who paid the terrible price of sexual mutilation in order to maintain their perfect child soprano voices. Interrupted Aria by Beverle Graves Myers, October 1, 2004, Poisoned Pen Press edition, Paperback in English - Largeprint edition.