THE WATERLINE

The Florentine Investigations of Marta Leone — Book 10

Venice, November 1966.

Three paintings disappear beneath the floodwaters of the acqua alta. They are declared destroyed, an insurance claim is paid, and for sixty years the case appears to be nothing more than a forgotten chapter in the history of a devastated city.

Then, in 2026, the paintings suddenly reappear in a private sale in Lugano.

Marta Leone is hired by an insurance company to locate and recover them. But before she can begin, Lidia Furlan, the archivist who claimed to possess proof that the paintings had survived the flood, is found dead inside Palazzo Zennaro.

The official explanation is an accident.

Marta is not convinced.

The investigation takes her from Florence to Venice and into a maze of old inventories, restoration workshops, insurance records, hidden photographs and documents that have survived for six decades. Every piece of evidence seems to tell a different story: perhaps the paintings were never in the flood at all. Perhaps the 1967 insurance claim was simply the result of an innocent mistake.

But the deeper Marta looks, the clearer it becomes that someone has spent years protecting a much older secret.

And the three paintings are only the beginning.

Behind them lies a forgotten agreement, a family fortune built on a deception, a powerful Swiss financial connection—and a trail leading back to people who have been hiding the truth since 1966.

As the waterline rises once again in Venice, Marta must determine who is telling the truth before the last surviving evidence disappears.

A gripping Italian crime mystery about art, deception, forgotten archives and a sixty-year-old secret buried beneath the waters of Venice.