A heady combination of food, wine, sex, love, intrigue, international politics and finance meet - violently - in a remote Tuscan mountain village.
Eddie is content. He has a house, in a remote Tuscan mountain village. His small patch of land provides vegetables, fruit, oil and, occasionally, a reasonably good wine - and a part time job at the University in Florence. He also has friends: in the valley and, little does he know it, beyond.
From that idyll to murder is a long way; encompassing, as it does, a wife intent on a vindictive divorce settlement, international politics, corruption, bribery, a complex money laundering scheme, a bank determined to destroy him … and an unlikely love affair, with a renegade Italian policewoman.
In the circumstances, it was fortunate Eddie had friends but it could not have been him - or any those friends - who actually pulled the trigger. They all had alibis, from the time that sixty people witnessed his wife storming from the restaurant, to when her body was discovered in the dark, unforgiving, forest, half her head blown away, 5 km distant.