In the muddy waters of the Tiber River, hard by the Basilica of San Paolo, a woman’s body is found in a pose that suggests she was the victim of a mysterious ritual. So Inspector Zuliani summons Nemo Sperati, a young professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. When Sperati takes in the scene of the crime, right away he gets it: the famous Ophelia in the painting by John Everett Millais. Just two weeks earlier, he had sized up the body of the director of Palazzo Barberini: that scene reproduced Artemisia Gentileschi’s Jael and Sisara, recently stolen. The plot thickens when the painting is found and Nemo learns it’s actually a fake, the handiwork of Rufo Speranza, the 20th century’s greatest forger, who had died by suicide many years before.

Mirko Zilahy holds a degree in foreign languages and literature from the University of Rome. He received his Ph.D from Trinity College in Dublin, where he taught Italian and Italian literature; he currently teaches English and English literature at Perugia’s University for Foreigners. He contributes to Il Corriere della Sera and has been an editor at minimum fax. He has written books about Irish authors and has translated novels such as The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and Mystic River by Dennis Lehane into Italian. In 2016, his first novel, È così che si uccide, featuring the character Enrico Mancini, was published by Longanesi. He has since written: La forma del buio (2017), Così crudele è la fine (2018), L’uomo del bosco (2021), and Nostra signora delle nuvole (HarperCollins, 2023).