Shadow of Madness by DV Bishop

Shadow of Madness is the sixth book in DV Bishop’s excellent and award-winning historical crime series set in Renaissance Florence and featuring investigator Cesare Aldo. This book finds Aldo out of Florence with his friend and lover Doctor Saul Orvieto. Aldo is in pursuit of answers to his origins but ends up with much more to deal with. As with the previous book, Carnival of Lies, Bishop shifts gears a little with Shadow of Madness delivering something more in the way of an isolated location thriller.

In Carnival of Lies, Aldo discovered information about his mother and has now learned that he was possibly born at a remote clifftop location called the Ospedal de’Pazzi. Once a place where unwed women would be sent to give birth, the Ospedal has in more recent years become an asylum. Aldo and Orvieto have been given permission to go there under the pretence of checking the records and the treatment of the inmates. While they are only supposed to spend the day at the Ospedal, a blizzard strands them there. And then the murders start.

Bishop makes the most of his setting. The remote, cold and forbidding building, with its mentally ill patients who are all whispering about a supernatural being they call the ‘Spirito’. There is conflict and competition between the priests, who are responsible for the male inmates, the nuns who are responsible for the female inmates and the running of the facility, and the very earthy guards. There are only a few people that Aldo can trust as he puts himself in danger and the body count rises. In amongst this Aldo is also trying to dig into his own past, a mission that seems to be impacting on his own mental health.

As noted, six books in and DV Bishop continues to keep this series fresh by changing up the tone and the style. While the first few books were historical procedurals, the last was more of a spy novel with some heist elements. Shadow of Madness is still a murder mystery but embedded in a remote location thriller where an unknown killer is picking off characters one by one. At the same time, Bishop does not lose sight of Aldo’s search for information about his mother and his origins, and manages to bring some long awaited resolution of this ongoing plot thread.

While it might be able to be read as a standalone, Shadow of Madness not only progresses Aldo’s family issues but ties closely to a number of previous Aldo novels particularly the second, The Darkest Sin, the fourth, A Divine Fury, and the previous instalment. And it also ends on a bit of cliffhanger which seems to promise further exploration of the plot lines that ran through this and those previous two books.

Shadow of Madness by DV Bishop

8.5

8.5/10