The Florentine
by Tom Trott
When Cain retired from the CIA, he moved to Florence, Italy to get away from his past.
He’s had nine years to enjoy fine wine, good food, and the Tuscan countryside.
But now his old boss has tracked him down, and he needs Cain to do one last job.
What starts as a simple trade entangles Cain in a web of secrets involving the mafia, an NSA whistleblower, and his own past.
With the Italian police and international assassins on his trail, he’ll have to survive the night to solve the mystery of who wants him dead.
My Rating:
Favorite Quotes:
It filled them with a perverse kind of terror to know that a man as bloodthirsty, as ruthless, was living in the same house as them and sometimes needed help to get up off the toilet.
Dolly was poring over the breakfast options, salivating. They were hungry like stray dogs.
On balance, she trusted Cain. It wasn’t so much the things he did or the things he said, it was the way he did them and the way he said them. He felt like your best friend’s dad, the one that didn’t leer at you.
They could solve the world’s problems with the resources they commanded, but they had to be given a shindig like tonight just to part with their small change. Maltby had long come to the revelation that the richest are the meanest. They are the only ones whose compassion you have to buy… But they can understand a free buffet, and they’ll give a twenty-thousand-euro donation if you throw in live entertainment.
Standing just a few meters away was a blond guard with a haircut you could use to sharpen a pencil.
My Review:
This was a riveting, well nuanced, and action-packed tale full of violence, an alphabet soup of spy networks, amusing observations, oddly compelling characters, and an uncomfortably realistic storyline of governmental double-dealing and corruption. The original storylines were multi-leveled and well textured with humor, snark, tension, impending peril around every corner, and the cold-blooded killers who brought it. Tom Trott’s writing has never failed to entertain and always contains several stupendous twists I could never have conjured in my wildest imaginings.
About the Author
Tom Trott is an author, film nerd, and proverbial Brighton rock. He lives in Brighton, UK, with his wife and their daughter. His latest thriller, The Florentine, was published in 2022.
He published his first novel, You Can’t Make Old Friends, in 2016, since then he has written five more books. He writes film reviews and features for Frame Rated.
His inspirations as a writer come from a diverse range of storytellers including Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Joel & Ethan Coen, Daphne du Maurier, Alfred Hitchcock, Ira Levin, Quentin Tarantino, and many more books and films beside.