Death at the Venetian Ball- A Hercule Bouvard Mystery

Every guest wore a mask. One of them wore murder beneath it.Venice, autumn 1958. Inside the Palazzo Bellaforte, thirty-eight guests dance behind gold and silver masks at the most exclusive private ball the city has seen in years, until a woman in white leads Ambassador Lucien Moreau into the library, and he is never seen alive again.No one saw a face. No one can prove who was where. In a room built entirely around the pleasant fiction that nobody need be who they claim, the murderer has chosen the one night in Venice when an entire palace of witnesses becomes worthless.Called in from Milan, celebrated detective Hercule Bouvard arrives to find a case that reaches back twenty years before the ball ever began, to a dismissed servant girl who vanished in 1938, a missing photograph, a black mask marked with a single letter, and a name no one in the palace will say aloud. As a second body falls and old secrets surface faster than the tide in the canals, Bouvard must unmask a killer who has spent two decades hiding in plain sight, protected by exactly the kind of silence this beautiful, secretive city has always known how to keep.Perfect for fans of Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot, classic whodunit mysteries, and Golden Age detective fiction set against Venice, Italy- Death at the Venetian Ball is an atmospheric, twisting mystery about masks, memory, and the truths that outlive the people who bury them.If you loved the Poirot novels, Death on the Nile, or Knives Out, don’t miss this masquerade.