THE LAST VENETIAN SPY. Love, Betrayal, and the Fall of the Republic (en Inglés) - Marco Delfiore

Venice, 1796. The most sophisticated spy network in Europe is collapsing and the man running it has just fallen for the enemy.

For twenty years, Luca Morosini has served the Most Serene Republic of Venice as its most capable intelligence operative. His network of agents, scattered from Milan to Vienna, has kept the Republic informed of every threat approaching its lagoon. But Napoleon Bonaparte's army is now forty miles from the Venetian border, and Luca's operatives are being identified and silenced one by one. Someone inside the government is selling them. And when the lace pattern delivered by his last Burano asset spells out a name of six letters, that name belongs to the man who trained him.

Isabeau Colbert arrived in Venice eleven days ago as a French widow with impeccable cover and a precise assignment: identify and expose the Inquisitori's remaining agent network before the Republic falls. She is fluent, professional, and entirely prepared for this city. She is not prepared for Luca Morosini, whom she identifies across a crowded piazza before he crosses it to speak to her, and who is she notes in her report with the clinical accuracy that has kept her alive for six years the most interesting person she has encountered in this work.

They are each other's target. They both know it. They proceed anyway.

Set against the documented final months of the Venetian Republic the last Carnival, Napoleon's ultimatum, the Veronese Easter uprising of April 1797, and the Great Council's vote of 12 May 1797 that ended 1,111 years of continuous republican governance The Last Venetian Spy is a literary historical thriller of exceptional atmosphere and moral precision. It is a novel about what we owe to institutions that fail us, about whether love can be genuine between two people who began as each other's mission, and about the specific courage required to remain loyal to something you already know is ending.

The city's canals, its masks, its unique geography of no roads and no escape are not merely backdrop. They are the architecture of the novel's central question: in a world of permanent concealment, what does it mean to finally stop hiding?

For readers of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, Kate Mosse's Labyrinth, and Alan Furst's The Foreign Correspondent.