The Bellini Card

Book excerpt: Investigator Yashim travels to Venice in the latest installment of the Edgar® Award–winning author Jason Goodwin's captivating historical mystery series Jason Goodwin's first Yashim mystery, The Janissary Tree, brought home the Edgar® Award for Best Novel. His follow-up, The Snake Stone, more than lived up to expectations and was hailed by Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times Book Review as "a magic carpet ride to the most exotic place on earth." Now, in The Bellini Card, Jason Goodwin takes us back into his "intelligent, gorgeous and evocative" (The Independent on Sunday) world, as dazzling as a hall of mirrors and utterly compelling. Istanbul, 1840: the new sultan, Abdülmecid, has heard a rumor that Bellini's vanished masterpiece, a portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror, may have resurfaced in Venice. Yashim, our eunuch detective, is promptly asked to investigate, but -- aware that the sultan's advisers are against any extravagant repurchase of the painting -- decides to deploy his disempowered Polish ambassador friend, Palewski, to visit Venice in his stead. Palewski arrives in disguise in down-and-out Venice, where a killer is at large as dealers, faded aristocrats, and other unknown factions seek to uncover the whereabouts of the missing Bellini. But is it the Bellini itself that endangers all, or something associated with its original loss? And why is it that all the killer's victims are somehow tied to the alluring Contessa d'Aspi d'Istria? Will the Austrians unmask Palewski, or will the killer find him first? Only Yashim can uncover the truth behind the manifold mysteries.