Sent to the Devil

Set in Venice in 1788, Lebow’s outstanding sequel to 2015’s The Figaro Murders finds poet Lorenzo Da Ponte hard at work adapting his own libretto for Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The production will be a command performance for Emperor Joseph II, whose recent declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire has left the Austrian capital politically divided. The brutal slaying of a scholarly friend of Lorenzo’s, Fr. Alois Bayer, whose killer carved lines into his forehead, ratchets up the tension. Some residents fear that Turks, who have infiltrated the city, are responsible. Count Pergen, the minister of police, recruits Lorenzo to investigate, given the poet’s previous successes as a sleuth. Pergen reveals that a prominent general, whose death was publicly attributed to a seizure, was murdered in a fashion similar to the priest’s. The minister believes that the dead men, who represented the military and the church, were targeted as “symbols of Austrian greatness.” The puzzle, characters, and period detail are all top-notch. Agent: John Talbot, Talbot Fortune Agency. (Apr.)