Sea of Lost Love

By Santa Montefiore

($15.00, Touchstone)



This enticing novel begins like a British sitcom, causing the reader to view even the most serious events with a droll expectation of what this might really mean to the plot.

Celestria, the catered-to daughter of a wealthy family, is barely of marriageable age when she finds that her beloved father is missing, seeming to have committed suicide at sea. After her initial grief, she feels indignant in the knowledge that if he'd shot himself, they'd at least have a body to bury. He appears to have squandered her inheritance, and her reaction is that "I haven't been poor yet, but I know I'll hate it."

She has gathered this sense of self-importance from her mother, who shares her own grief by complaining to the local clergyman that her husband has left her widowed and her children fatherless, and "black really isn't my color, either." Their superstitious housekeeper had sensed something was wrong when she saw a single magpie in the garden. She knew that the sighting of a magpie indicated "one for sorrow, two for joy...but the damn thing was all on its own."

Celestria soon decides that her father would not have deliberately left them and must have been murdered. She uncovers clues that lead her to Italy in search of the truth and justice for her father. As the story becomes a mystery, the author offers descriptions of Italy that identify the atmosphere well, with old men lingering on benches, "puffing on pipes and old regrets."

Reading this book is like eating a choice dessert. It starts off tasty and interesting, sits on the palette with intrigue and desire for more, then ends with a satisfying smack of the lips.

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