Cold Tuscan Stone: A Rick Montoya Italian Mystery Audiobook

Rick Montoya has just moved from Santa Fe to Rome, embracing the life of a translator. He's beginning to settle in to la dolce vita when school friend Beppo, now senior in the Italian Art Squad, recruits Rick for an unofficial undercover role. Armed with a list of galleries, suspects, and an expense account, Rick arrives in Tuscany posing as a buyer for a Santa Fe gallery to flush out traffickers in priceless burial urns.

However, before sunset on his first day in Volterra, the challenge intensifies. Rick has one quick conversation with a gallery employee who dies minutes later in a brutal fall from a high cliff. Has the trade in fraudulent artifacts upgraded to murder? Are the traffickers already on to Rick?

The local commissario and his team consider Rick an amateur and, worse, a foreigner. Plus Rick is a suspect in what proves to be the dead man's murder. While the Volterra squad pursues its leads, Rick continues to interview his list: a museum director, a top gallery owner, a low-profile import-export businessman and his enterprising color-coordinated assistant, a sensuous heiress with a private art specialty and clientele. When Rick's girlfriend Erica, an art history professor, arrives from Rome to visit him, she rekindles a friendship with an alluring, maybe dangerous, acquaintance. Has Rick's role made him the target of both cops and criminals?

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“If you are interested in Italianart and artifacts, Italian history and culture, Italian food and wine, or evenjust good storytelling, then Cold Tuscan Stone—thefirst in what will hopefully become a series of Rick Montoya Italian mysteries—willbe right up your cobblestone alleyway. Set in the ancient Tuscan town ofVolterra, David P. Wagner’s atmospheric debut novel delivers all of the aboveand more…Simply put, this exciting, intriguing, well-written mystery extends anoffer no reader should refuse. Capiche?”

— Amanda Matetsky, author of the Paige Turner mysteries