Magdalen Nabb: Some Bitter Taste

By MICHELE HEWITSON

No prizes for guessing that the publishing house is pushing Guarnaccia on the back of the success of Donna Leon's murder-most-foul-in-Venice series.

But Nabb is fabulous in Florence in her own right. Her melancholy policeman, Marshal Guarnaccia, is as trapped by his incomprehension about, well, almost everything including his son's addiction to computer games, as he is by the heat of a tourist-overrun Florence.

There is a murder on his patch but his daily life is taken up with the tourists and their fried brains for "Florence lay in an unbroken breathless torpor, broiling the tourists so that they got tireder and hotter and more forgetful of their cameras and handbags. The marshal's office filled daily."

The harassed Guarnaccia frets over all of them, especially the nervous spinster who came to him with her neurotic worries about someone having been in her flat. He promises to visit but his attention is taken up with an Albanian prostitution ring.

The woman is found dead and Guarnaccia's conscience worries away at him like prickly heat, as does his weight.

Nabb writes affectionately about her character. He "lowered himself carefully onto a round-backed chair. The sort designed to hold a carelessly thrown negligee rather than one hundred ninety-eight pounds of carabiniere."

He is a wonderful character, and Nabb's Florence books are better than a trip to Florence during the hot season.

(William Heinemann $34.95)