The Fontanelle Matchmaker

About this book

Naples, 1973. Cholera has come back, and Nunzia Iervolino, a laboratory technician at the Cotugno hospital, is the one who sees it first: yellow colonies on a culture plate. She is a woman of method. She left the alleys of Materdei behind long ago, and with them her grandmother's trade, matching the poor dead of the Fontanelle ossuary with the living who will care for them. Then a dead girl starts visiting her dreams, the same girl who answered her in the caves in 1943, when Nunzia was fourteen, the Germans held the city and her brother lay bleeding. Lucrezia knows where the sickness is moving. She also remembers what Nunzia promised her. The trail leads back into Nunzia's own family. To follow it she must choose between her brother and her city, and face what she owes to the people downstairs.