ARmy Rumour SErvice

The first May competition is for the chance to win some good summer holiday reading. Set in Florence, The Dead Season is a crime/thriller with the usual dead bodies and missing people. It is by a good author, Christobel Kent, who sets most of her stories in Italy.

The competition can be entered in the usual way by completing the entry form. The competition will run until Sunday 13 May 2012 at around midday (ish).

A quick sysnopsis of the book..........

Florence is deserted. The sluggish Arno and the Ponte Vecchio shimmer in the summer haze. A corpse lies on the roadside, waiting for discovery... Every August, Florence shimmers in the summer heat. But this year the heat wave is fiercer than usual, and the city's inhabitants have fled to the cool of the hills and beaches of the surrounding countryside. So it is no surprise that amidst the shrubbery of a normally busy roundabout, a corpse lies unnoticed, bloating in the humid air.

Sandro Cellini will not be joining the crowds of holidaymakers this year. The former policeman turned private detective has a case: a man who seems to have vanished into thin air - leaving his pregnant young wife alone in the city. Meanwhile, bank teller Roxana Delfino is also stuck in the city for the season, with nothing to do but worry for her aging mother and puzzle over the disappearance of one her regular clients.

As all Florence sweats it out, Cellini attempts as best he can to grapple with his case and the complications it throws up. And when the weather finally breaks, it brings with it a shocking revelation...

One of the reviewers told me that they now have a copy of the book so have asked for it to be reallocated to I got another number drawn and the lucky person is pussers-hard. (I take it that that is a nautical not porno-graphical term)