The strange death of a romantic - Jim Williams

La Spexia, Italy, 1930. Young doctor Guy Parrot passes a summer in the company of his rich and glamorous friends: the actor/dramatist Ambrose Carmody, the poet Lewis Lockyer, the bootlegger Jackie Ferris, the socialite Margot Davenant, and the fascinating Julia Carradine. They while away the long evenings in weaving stories around a murder mystery: the death of the poet Shelley, who drowned at La Spezia just over a century before. On the surface their stories are a witty parody of various writers, but a sinister subtext hints at tensions within the group. The summer ends with a disappearance, a death and a disastrous love affair...In 1945 Guy returns to La Spezia to found an Army hospital in the aftermath of the War. With the aid of a fascist policeman, Signor Porrello, and hints from the elderly medium, Madame Hecate and the mysterious Signor Nessuno, Guy has an opportunity to reconstruct that summer in La Spezia and save his marriage from emotional sterility. But first he must discover the identity of a corpse in the water cistern - and escape the machinations of the delightfully villainous Corporal Long.