Looking back over my reviews, I see that I've been reading Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily books since 2010, and that they've been enjoyable but a bit uneven throughout the series. The Dark Heart of Florence is one of the lesser series entries - entertaining, but the main mystery is a bit obvious. It opens with Emily overhearing one of her husband Colin's fellow operatives suggesting that he and Emily go to Florence both so he can investigate a crime and to get away from an unknown threat. Once ensconced in his daughter's villa (inherited from her mother, another spy and Colin's long-ago lover), they find a dead body. Emily and her friend Cecile (a French woman of a certain age and with an interest in attractive, intelligent men) investigate both this crime and an apparent cypher written on the walls of the villa. As she's done with most of her books, Alexander also tells a story set further in the past - here, a woman who lived in the villa in the late Fifteenth Century. All three threads come together in a somewhat obvious and slightly forced conclusion. Enjoyable but not particularly memorable, The Dark Heart of Venus is worth reading for the atmosphere and for Cecile, but otherwise mediocre.
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