Season of Storms by Susanna Kearsley

Season of Storms by Susanna Kearsley was first published in 2010. It’s only the second book by her which I’ve read but I’ll definitely be reading more because this one was really good. Her writing reminds me so much of Mary Stewart and yes, even Daphne du Maurier, this one was perfect summer reading.

A young actress, Celia is given the lead part in a play which is being staged in an Italian villa. The whole idea for it has been set up by Alessandro D’Ascanio, whose grandfather wrote the play decades earlier. The villa originally belonged to D’Ascanio the elder and when his play was about to be performed originally, the leading actress disappeared the night before the performance.

Celia’s friend is a dab hand with the tarot cards and when some worrying cards turn up whilst doing Celia’s reading she advises her not to go, the cards are disastrous. But Celia hasn’t been to Italy before and there’s a trip to Venice in the offing before travelling on to the villa’s location above Lake Garda, it’s a great experience beckoning to her and she’s not going to give up on it.

The setting is a beautiful house with wonderful gardens and with Alessandro D’Ascanio turning out to be very handsome everything should be perfect, but there are strange goings-on almost as soon as she gets there and some of the other actors are a bit on the dodgy side.

The only thing about this book which annoyed me was the fact that Alessandro, who is half Italian and half English and is mainly called Alex, is forever going into rooms completely unheard, all I can say is he must have been wearing rubber soled shoes! Oh and although the setting is Italy, there was an awful lot of bad weather, just when we were having awful weather, I could really have been doing with some Mediterranean sunshine, even if only at second hand.

According to this book Oscar Wilde described travelling in a gondola on a Venetian canal as ‘like going through a sewer in a coffin’ – before that I had been thinking I was missing out on something, never having been there, I’m not so sure now!