Lucy Rey is having a very bad week. Besides finding out Julian, her fiancé—the one who convinced her to move to Las Vegas and rent, in her name, an expensive apartment and then decamped to Hollywood in order to find work as an actor—is cheating on her, her hairdressing business is in a slump, and she hates Vegas. Oh, and the diamond engagement ring Julian gave her is really cubic zirconia.
And so when she sees an advertisement for an expense paid job with a $25,000 success fee just to find a missing sister and deliver unspecified bad news, what does she have to lose? Her flight to Europe is all paid, there’s a generous per diem, and Ortisei, the village in the Italian Dolomites where she is sent, is totally charming.
But being a Bearer of Bad News (Gallery Books), which is the title of Lucy’s new job and this first novel by Elisabeth Dini, is not a slam dunk. First of all, Taffy, the woman who hired her, is totally flaky, the assignment murky, and, Lucy soon discovers, the village, though quaint and pretty has an unsavory past including Nazis and stolen jewels.
Soon, the assignment gets even stranger as it becomes apparent that Taffy (real name Countess Tabitha Georgiana Wellington Ernst) crafted the ad to attract and hire Lucy, who is the estranged granddaughter of a once very famous movie actress.
Taffy isn’t the only one searching for stolen jewels. There’s the Department of Lost Things, a quasi-government agency working to return valuables people lost during the war.
“The Department of Lost Things was inspired by stories about the numerous ongoing lawsuits over art and other valuables that were stolen or sold during World War II,” says Dini. “I was shocked by how long the legal process takes–many cases are still ongoing even decades later, with some of those suing for the return of family heirlooms dying before the case could reach a resolution.”
Dini always found stories about clandestine secret organizations fascinating and so inventing the Department of Lost Things, an organization working to return the diamonds to their rightful owner, was a natural solution.
“As for the idea of a Bearer of Bad News, I was reading an article about a man who had outsourced various life tasks to a virtual personal assistant, from writing an apology email to his wife to calling companies to complain on his behalf, and I thought that if people would pay for that, then why not outsource delivering bad news?” she says.
But being a bad news bearer doesn’t go smoothly for Lucy. Chased by an influencer whose photo shoot she accidentally interrupted, Lucy is hidden by a charming hotel clerk in rooms above the oldest tavern in town, which is also where much of the action happened in the past. For being hidden away, Lucy’s lodgings get a lot of action—including a handsome man she met on the tram and Coco, the missing sister, a human rights attorney who might have been fired under suspicious circumstances. In other words, who do you trust?
Dini drew upon her work as a trial lawyer at the International Criminal Court when writing the book.
“I knew from working with legal case files what types of things might end up there after years of investigating, and my background interviewing witnesses informed the interview files as well,” she says, noting that no matter how different the conflict or the country where it happens, certain things are always true: among the ugliness, there are always acts of extraordinary kindness and bravery. “As heavy as it felt at times, my time prosecuting war crimes left me hopeful about the ultimate nature of human beings, and I wanted to leave readers with this same feeling of hope, especially in a time when world events can feel very heavy.”
Shelf Life 