Book Review: The Four Horsemen (The Alvise Marangon Mysteries #2) by Gregory Dowling

Title: The Four Horsemen (The Alvise Marangon Mysteries #2)

Author: Gregory Dowling

Stars: 4 out of 5 stars

Review:
The Four Horsemen is the second in The Alvise Marangon Series and while I wasn't lost in the story the author had me wondering about the words he used. When a readers can't figure out a word it taken them out of the story bring it to a crawl.  While most readers will be ale to figure out the meaning of the different words non the less other will struggle causing them to leave the story behind.
The Alvise is a tour guide in the city of Venice. The author Gregory Dowling is able to paint such a beautiful picture readers will feel like the are walking the streets. Gregory Dowling has a wonderful ability to create banter that flows from the different characters making memorial moments in the story.
While this story doesn't stand out from all the other authors who write about unknown forces his ability to paint pictures of the locations will bring readers to Venice never wanting to leave.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher Thomas Dunne Books for the advance copy


Synopsis:
The second of two historical thrillers set in 18th century Venice, featuring a tour guide who is drafted as part of the Venetian secret service.

Tour guide Alvise Marangon thinks he knows Venice better than ever, but now finds himself ensnared by mysteries as obscure as the city and in many cases just as old.

Certain that he is finally about to have his guide’s license revoked after a tavern brawl, Alvise is instead dragooned into the service of Missier Grande, who has linked the death of one of his agents to a secret society known as the Four Horsemen. Every attempt that Missier Grande makes to investigate the matter is blocked by forces on high, and enlisting Alvise is a move of last resort—one last-ditch effort to uncover the crimes of the present in the secrets of the past before the future claims more lives.

Among the dark arcades and fetid canals of 18th century Venice, Alvise is the one who finds himself led on a tour, at any turn of which could lie a fresh corpse or an ancient conspiracy

Hardcover, 304 pages

Expected publication: October 10th 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books

About The Author:


Gregory Dowling grew up in Bristol, UK. He studied English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He moved to Italy after graduating and has lived there since 1979, teaching in language schools in Naples, Siena, Verona and eventually Venice, where he has lived since 1981. He is now Associate Professor of American Literature at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He published four thrillers in the 1980s and 1990s and then devoted himself to academic work and translation. He returned to fiction in 2015, with his novel set in 18th-century Venice, Ascension, and the sequel The Four Horsemen in 2017 (the Alvise Marangon Mysteries). 
His academic work mainly concerns British and American poetry; he has published a study of American narrative poetry, a study of the poet David Mason, a guidebook to Byron's Venice and has co-edited two anthologies of 20th-century poetry. He has also published numerous essays and articles on writers from the Romantic period to the present day. He was non-fiction editor for the magazine Able Muse for several years and is responsible for the British section of the Italian poetry magazine Semicerchio. He has also written numerous articles on Venice, and was responsible for the sightseeing pages of the first five editions of the Time Out Guide to Venice. He is on the board of the committee for a new museum in Ravenna devoted to Lord Byron, due to open in 2019.