Cold Tuscan Stone (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries, 1)

Rick Montoya has moved from New Mexico to Rome, embracing the life of a translator. He's settling in to la dolce vita when a school friend who is now senior in the Italian Art Squad recruits Rick for an unofficial undercover role. Armed with a list of galleries, suspects, and an expense account, Rick would arrive in Tuscany posing as a buyer for a Santa Fe gallery and flush out burial urn traffickers.
 But before sunset on Rick's first day in Volterra, a gallery employee dies in a brutal fall from a high cliff.
 The local Commissario and his team consider Rick an amateur, and worse, a foreigner. And now they suspect him in the dead man's murder. While the Volterra squad pursues its leads, Rick continues to interview his list: a museum director, a top gallery owner, a low-profile import/export businessman and his enterprising color-coordinated assistant, and a sensuous heiress with a private art specialty and clientele.
 When Rick's girlfriend Erica arrives from Rome to visit him, she rekindles a friendship with an alluring, maybe dangerous, acquaintance. Has Rick's role made him the target of both cops and criminals?

Cold Tuscan Stone (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

Literature & Fiction

Wagner, David P.

United States

Poisoned Pen Press

Death in the Dolomites (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

Rick Montoya is looking forward to a break from his translation business in Rome - a week of skiing in the Italian Alps with old college buddy Flavio. But Rick's success helping the Italian police with a murder in Tuscany sends the Campiglio cops his way. An American banker working in Milano is missing. The man's sister, an attractive and spoiled divorcée, has no idea where he could be, nor do the locals who saw him on his way to the slopes. With the discovery of a body, Rick and Inspector Albani widen their list of suspects. Picturesque resort Campiglio harbors old rivalries, citizens on the make, and a cut-throat political campaign. Why would these local issues, any of them, connect to the missing banker?
 The investigation doesn't keep Rick and Flavio from enjoying perfect ski conditions in the Dolomites and glorious after-ski wines and bowls of fresh pasta. As for women - Rick has to wonder if the banker's sister is just hitting him up for information. The action heats up, testing laid-back Rick whose uncle, a Roman cop, keeps urging him to make the police his career.
 As in Cold Tuscan Stone, Death in the Dolomites immerses us in the sights, smells and tastes of Italy, this time in a picture-perfect Alpine town with a surprising negative side.

Death in the Dolomites (Rick Montoya Italian Mystery)

Poisoned Pen Pr

Return to Umbria (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries, 4)

"Wagner skillfully inserts nuggets of local culture without slowing down the narrative pace, and perhaps even more importantly, he gets Italy right. He understands the nuances of Italian manners and mentality as well as the glorious national preoccupation with food." ―Publishers Weekly
Orvieto―its very name brings to mind priceless art, colorful ceramics, and straw-colored wine. And the most famous cathedral façade in Italy, a structure of gothic spires, arches, statues, and mosaics. But as Rick Montoya discovers, this jewel of Umbria can have an ugly side as well.
When Rick Montoya moved to his mother's Italy from his father's Santa Fe, New Mexico, to work as a freelance translator using his dual heritage, he didn't expect to be helping the Italian police. His maternal uncle, a high-level commissioner in Rome, however, sees no reason not to use the resources at hand.
Rick's fourth investigation should not have involved crime. It begins when Rick is asked by his uncle to go to Orvieto to talk some sense into his cousin Fabrizio, whose fling with an older married woman is embarrassing the family. Rick agrees to give it a try, and plans a short but romantic weekend in Orvieto with Betta Innocenti, the woman he met in Bassano. What could go wrong?
Less than a day after their arrival, his language skills draw him into the brutal murder of an American visitor. He finds that he knows the policeman in charge, but Inspector LoGuercio has changed since the time they met in Volterra. The murdered woman had studied art in Italy decades earlier―why has she returned now? And why was she dumped at night on a dusty road? Through her traveling companions, her devastated daughter and best friend, as well as a growing list of those who knew her from her student days, they realize she had come to Orvieto to face the past. And then a second murder occurs in a public park, with Montoya so close that he wonders if he could have been the intended target. Is all this connected to Fabrizio and his affair, or to the American's death? More violence erupts, some of it definitely directed at Rick himself.

Return to Umbria (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Rick Montoya, eager to experience more of his Italian mother's culture, heads to Rome to start his own translation business. He's armed with curiosity and an appetite for local food and wine.
Rick's maternal uncle is a Roman cop with one eye to his nephew's welfare and another to how Rick might be useful, perhaps widen his career choices. So Commissario Piero Fontana pulls Rick into an investigation: the murder of Count Umberto Zimbardi.
The wealthy count enjoyed indulging a circle of convivial friends and a hobby collecting oral histories by interviewing residents in the city's centro storico. After heading home from such an afternoon, he was found dead on a bridge over the Tiber.
As a newcomer and an investigator, Rick makes rookie mistakes. He's learning the ropes as an amateur sleuth and that living in Rome is different from visiting. Plus he's distracted by a woman pressing him into service as a tour guide and the arrival of a college friend on a mission to sell Argentine wine to the Vatican.
In Roman Count Down, the city emerges as another character in David Wagner's "...usual deft mix of travel and suspense" (Kirkus Reviews). Like all the Rick Montoya Mysteries, this prequel is rich in food, drink, and local culture and landmarks.

Roman Count Down (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries, 6)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

[Library Edition Audiobook CD in sturdy Vinyl case.]  [Read by David Colacci] American Rick Montoya lives in Rome, has an interesting job, and dates a beautiful Italian woman. What more could a guy ask for? How about an undercover job for Italian art police trying to identify traffickers in priceless Etruscan burial urns? A high school buddy who works as an art cop asks Rick to travel to the Tuscan city of Volterra to pose as an art buyer from Santa Fe, with an expense account and a list of suspects provided. This pleases Rick's uncle no end; he is a prominent policeman in Rome who would love to see his nephew get into police work. Rick's girlfriend Erica, an art history professor, thinks it is his civic duty to take the job, although she doesn't know that a college friend, the sensuous Donatella, is on the suspect list. Just a few hours after his arrival in Tuscany, Rick finds himself a suspect in a brutal murder. The local commissario, who was not happy in the first place about an amateur on his turf -- and worse yet, a foreigner -- is less than pleased about Rick's involvement with a murder. The death doesn't appear to be connected to the trafficking operation, but curiously, everyone on Rick's list seems keenly interested in the homicide. While Rick follows his instructions from the art cops and the policeman tries to track down the murderer, the two men take separate paths through the ancient stone streets, their cases slowly weaving together.

Blackstone Audiobooks

[Read by David Colacci]  American Rick Montoya lives in Rome, has an interesting job, and dates a beautiful Italian woman. What more could a guy ask for? How about an undercover job for Italian art police trying to identify traffickers in priceless Etruscan burial urns?  A high school buddy who works as an art cop asks Rick to travel to the Tuscan city of Volterra to pose as an art buyer from Santa Fe, with an expense account and a list of suspects provided. This pleases Rick's uncle no end; he is a prominent policeman in Rome who would love to see his nephew get into police work. Rick's girlfriend Erica, an art history professor, thinks it is his civic duty to take the job, although she doesn't know that a college friend, the sensuous Donatella, is on the suspect list.  Just a few hours after his arrival in Tuscany, Rick finds himself a suspect in a brutal murder. The local commissario, who was not happy in the first place about an amateur on his turf -- and worse yet, a foreigner -- is less than pleased about Rick's involvement with a murder. The death doesn't appear to be connected to the trafficking operation, but curiously, everyone on Rick's list seems keenly interested in the homicide.  While Rick follows his instructions from the art cops and the policeman tries to track down the murderer, the two men take separate paths through the ancient stone streets, their cases slowly weaving together.

Cold Tuscan Stone: A Rick Montoya Italian Mystery (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

A Funeral in Mantova

ReadHowYouWant

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Books by Wagner, David P.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wagner, David P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Cold Tuscan Stone (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

Cold Tuscan Stone (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

Death in the Dolomites (Rick Montoya Italian Mystery)

Death in the Dolomites (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

Return to Umbria (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

Roman Count Down (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries, 6)

Cold Tuscan Stone (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

Cold Tuscan Stone: A Rick Montoya Italian Mystery (Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries)

A Funeral in Mantova