The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

64 NOVEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL arrival of a college friend on a mission to sell Argentine wine to the Vatican. Despite all those distractions, Rick works with his uncle to solve the case before more bodies turn up. David P. Wagner is a retired Foreign Service officer who spent nine years in Italy, where he learned to love all things Italian. Other diplomatic assignments included Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay and Washington, D.C. He and his wife, Mary, live in Pueblo, Colorado. To Die in Tuscany: A Rick Montoya Italian Mystery David P. Wagner, Poisoned Pen Press, 2021, $15.99/paperback, e-book available, 272 pages. In Book 7 of this series, Rick Montoya is looking forward to a quiet weekend getaway with his girlfriend, Betta, an art fraud investigator for the Italian Culture Ministry. Their destination: the beauti- ful village of Urbino, where Betta is to collect a priceless drawing from a wealthy Spanish collector on the ministry’s behalf. But when the Spaniard is found murdered and the drawing stolen, Betta must shift back into art cop mode, and Rick’s official services are required, after all. The chase takes the couple fromUrbino’s cobbled streets to eastern Tuscany and back, as the list of suspects grows longer and more dangerous. A Simple Love Tatiana Gfoeller-Volkoff, Outskirts Press, 2021, $36.95/hardcover, e-book available, 180 pages. Each reader will have to decide whether the title of this novel is ironic. After all, love between two people is rarely simple. So the quest for love among a group of three would seem doomed to be complex and messy, if it can succeed at all. In the 1980s, bisexual American student Marielle Laurenceay arrives at the University of Florence. There she meets Allè Della Tararne and Enrico Della Ferrea, two male Italian students who are also bisexual, and who both fall in love with her. Complicating matters further, Enrico is in love with Allè, but not vice versa. For her part, Marielle loves both men for different reasons, but marries Allè—a well-intentioned choice that carries profound consequences for all three friends. Tatiana Gfoeller-Volkoff is a retired Senior Foreign Service officer and tandem with Ambassador Michael Gfoeller (see p. 70 for his book). She spent most of her career in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, including assignments as deputy chief of mission and consul general, before serving as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan from 2008 to 2011. She then served as a political adviser to two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before retiring from the Service. The French Paradox Ellen Crosby, Severn House Publishers, 2021, $17.95/paperback, e-book available, 256 pages. This new installment in Ellen Crosby’s Wine Country Mysteries series takes us back to 1949, when Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy) was spending her junior year abroad in Paris. There, she purchased several inexpensive portraits of Queen Marie Antoinette that a female artist had painted before falling into obscurity for two centuries. The future first lady also had a romantic relation- ship with Virginia vineyard owner Lucie Montgomery’s French grandfather—until recently, a well-kept secret. More than 70 years later, Cricket Delacroix, Lucie’s neighbor and Jackie’s schoolfriend, is donating the now-priceless paintings to a Washington, D.C., museum. Meanwhile, Lucie’s grandfather is flying to Virginia for Cricket’s 90th-birthday party, hosted by her daughter Harriet—who is rewriting a manuscript Jackie left behind about Marie Antoinette and her portraitist. She’s also adding tell-all details about Jackie she’s sure will make the book a bestseller. On the eve of the party, a world-famous landscape designer who also knew Jackie is found dead in Lucie’s vineyard. Did someone make good on the death threats he’d received because of his controversial book on climate change? Or was his murder tied to Jackie, the paintings and Lucie’s beloved grandfather? Ellen Crosby, the wife of FSO André de Nesnera, a Voice of America broadcaster, began writing mysteries under her maiden name when her husband was posted to Geneva. In addition to this series, now totaling 11 books, she has published Moscow Nights , a standalone mystery based loosely on her time as Moscow correspondent for ABC Radio News in the late 1980s, and two mysteries about international photojournalist Sophie Medina. You can visit her website at www.ellencrosby.com.