CITY OF VENGEANCE by D.N. Bishop

We love a detective with an irascible personality, an interesting and possibly dodgy back story, often a loner, burdened with a challenging underling or offsider, challenging crimes to solve, sometimes involving dangerous situations to sort it all out. And when the writer gives you a setting that is quite outside the usual scenario, we may well have a winner of a novel, and in this case, perhaps a new series  featuring this new detective. 

This novel is set in Florence, the winter of 1536, with the Medici family cementing their rule of the city. Alessandro is the first hereditary Medici ruler, and spends much of his time juggling the various threats to his rule, the court and its manipulative minions and the people of the city itself. Our hero is a former soldier, now an officer of the greatly feared criminal court, going by the marvellous name of Cesare Aldo. He lives in  rooms attached to a brothel, he has few friends and has his own juggling of threats to his existence to contend with. 

The story opens with him escorting an elderly Jewish banker on a journey back to Florence after some business in another city. An ambush immediately alerts Cesare to something sinister going on with the banker, and then when he is later found murdered, Ceasar is charged with finding out who is responsible. In the process he also unearths a plot to assassinate the Duke, which no one seems to want to know about, leaving him and his offsider to try to prevent the assassination occurring. 

So a great story line, with intriguing and well formed characters. But wait there is more. The setting of time and place is wonderfully depicted and described. Living in a Renaissance city was a horrible existence for 90% of the citizens. Poverty, squalor, disease, complete lack of hygiene, brutal. All the ghastly stuff. There is a character who is a doctor - fascinating to read how daily medical care was carried out, how an operation was done. This author has a terrific eye for putting the reader in the story, almost living and breathing the ugliness and violence of it all. I am very much looking forward to Cesare Aldo's second outing.