Status Updates From The Etruscan Smile: A Novel...

This is getting intriguing and mysterious. Let's see where this Italian gothic novel goes. Happy St. Valentine's Day, friends!

The beginning is way too typical of the mass produced "gothic mystery": a missing Sibling, who raised her because their parents died. Can't there be living parents of children having an overseas adventure or mystery? Now that the Etruscan note has come into this plot, it is gaining the intrigue I hoped for. It reminds me of the wonderful, late Lyn Hamilton; the Canadian who penned "The Etruscan Chimera" in 2002.

Finally hitting on content that would have enticed me to add this to my TR-prio. list. But it's scant, and the writing is... perfunctory. It reads like an episode of 'Murder, She Wrote' or something (I should mention that I haven't given that one a fair shake). But definitely akin to a 70/80s daytime TV-movie. Pretty landscape anyway (fictional Isolotta, in Tuscany, near Florence). Characters are cheesy stereotypes.

Older characters (MC is 23, men are late twenties to mid-thirties), but this reads like a YA novel somehow. Simple, I suppose.

Picking up. Can't get a minute's peace to read these days, it seems. At least the story has started.
Creepy to be a 23 year old girl on her own in Italy and to have a 30-something neighbour who used to bang your missing sister show up unannounced, walk into the apartment, and will wait for you to take a shower. She's captured well how it feels to be the female in this situation - "ill at ease" is putting it mildly.

Was it normal to send individual slides to relatives via the mail, rather than developed prints?! :S I remember slides - I thought they were the expensive option.
Our protagonist recognizes her sister's Tuscan farmhouse from the slides she sent, viewed through the slide viewer held up to the light... 1977. Why not just send a photographic print? Wouldn't slides be harder to come by in small town Italy anyway? :S

"Also by Velda Johnston"
Deveron Hill
The Frenchman
A Room with Dark Mirrors
The House of the Left Bank
I Came to the Highlands
The White Pavilion
Masquerade in Venice
The Late Mrs. Fonsell
The Mourning Trees
The Face in the Shadows
The People on the Hill
The Light in the Swamp
The Phantom Cottage
I Came to a Castle
A Howling in the Woods
House Above Hollywood
Along a Dark Path

So far, so good. Think Mary-Stewart-lite.

Reminiscent of "My brother Michael "...