January 2027
The Contarini Heir
Hannah comes to Venice for her father, and stays for a family that has agreed on a version of events.
Twenty years later, a box arrives containing everything her father owned — except the six months before he died.
What is in the box instead is a brass key, and a single word underlined twice in a hand she would know anywhere.
The novel
The Contarini Heir
Hannah Marsh was eight years old when her father drowned under the Ponte dei Tre Archi. Twenty years later she is a journalist herself, and she goes to Venice under a magazine assignment and a name that is only half a lie.
Lorenzo Contarini knows exactly who she is before she is shown through his door, and gives her a room in the palazzo anyway — which is either the most generous thing anyone has ever done for her, or the most efficient way to watch someone.
What Hannah expects to find is a cover-up. What she finds is a house in which four people have spent twenty years being scrupulously kind to one another and telling the truth to no one — and a question, underneath all of it, that nobody in either family has been willing to ask since 1996.
Somebody has been waiting a very long time for one of them to ask it.The Contarini Heir
Start here — free
The Second Furnace
New York, April 1996. A gallery on West Broadway, a Murano bowl, and a label that is not true.
A 2,600-word story from the world of the Contarini Trilogy, set ten years before the novel opens. It is not in the books, and it is free — no purchase, nothing to cancel. It is the shortest way to find out whether this voice is for you.
Delivered by BookFunnel in epub, mobi or pdf, for any reader or app. A few emails a year, and only when there is a book or a pre-order — nothing else, and you can leave in one click.
A Venice out of season: November fog, shuttered shopfronts, water a foot higher than it should be.For readers of Lucinda Riley & Kate Morton
Out 19 January 2027
Pre-order opens 20 November
Tell me the day it opensYou'll join the reading list, and I'll send one email the morning the pre-order goes live — nothing else that week. The free story arrives straight away: it is the same list, so there is only one thing to sign up for.
The ebook comes first, with the paperback alongside it. From 20 November this button becomes the pre-order link itself.
Three books
The Contarini Trilogy
Book Two — written
The house answers
What a household does once someone inside it has started telling the truth.
Book Three
To come
The last of the silence, and what it costs to put it down.
The author
Alessandra Marsh writes about families who have decided what happened — and about the people who arrive later and ask anyway.Alessandra Marsh is a pen name