About the Book

Venice, November 2019. The worst flooding the city has seen in over fifty years. Eighty-five per cent of the streets under water.

When a British art historian — a specialist in the painted angels of Venice — is found dead in a flooded bookshop, Nathan Sutherland is pressed by the British Ambassador to find out how she came to be there. Sutherland is the Honorary British Consul, not a detective, and the request is rather less an invitation than an instruction.

His questions lead him toward the Markham Foundation, a charity devoted to saving Venice from the water, and to its founder Giles Markham — wealthy, well connected, and considerably less straightforward than his public reputation suggests. As the acqua alta rises, the city’s respectable surfaces begin to come apart.

Join us to discuss reluctant amateur sleuths, a city that functions as a character in its own right, and the idea at the heart of the book: that angels come in many forms — merciful, fallen, and vengeful.

About the Author

Philip Gwynne Jones lives and writes in Venice, which is why the city in these novels reads as lived-in rather than researched. Alongside the Nathan Sutherland books he has written The Magus of Sicily and To Venice With Love, and he works as a translator.

The Angels of Venice is the sixth novel in the Nathan Sutherland series — atmospheric crime fiction that keeps all the pleasures of the setting without the grimness of noir.