“With its vivid, well-defined array of characters, The Malice of Fortune captures the glorious and gritty details of Renaissance Italy in a propulsive story. And in spite of the historical accuracy, not humanly accurate at all. There, when the block is pried out with the point of a knife, despite her tortured face muscles and dry mouth, she launches into a speech of more than 200 words, mostly telling the pope history he already knows, but which we need to learn. Almost immediately, the first main character, a courtesan named Damiata is abducted by Vatican officials, bound, gagged (with a block of wood that completely dried all the saliva in her mouth), and dragged to the papal offices.

The dialog didn't sound like any human beings I know actually talk. What's not to like? But I gave up after about 70 pages. A fascinating preface, a good map, a list of dramatis personae, and a recognition that despite the religious orthodoxy of the time, the popular belief was that that bitch the goddess Fortuna, not God, ran human affairs. I had very high hopes for this book-set in early 16th century Italy, based with careful attention to detail on actual events, and involving Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci as detectives (!) solving a murder. She enlists the help of an obscure Florentine diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Valentino’s eccentric military engineer, Leonardo da Vinci, who together must struggle to decipher the killer’s taunting riddles: Leonardo with his groundbreaking “science of observation” and Machiavelli with his new “science of men.” Traveling across an Italy torn apart by war, they will enter a labyrinth of ancient superstition and erotic obsession to discover at its center a new face of evil-and a truth that will shake the foundations of western civilization. Damiata suspects that the killer she seeks is one of the brutal condottierri, and as the murders multiply, her quest grows more urgent. Once there, Damiata becomes a pawn in the political intrigues of the pope’s surviving son, the charismatic Duke Valentino, whose own life is threatened by the condottieri, a powerful cabal of mercenary warlords. When Pope Alexander dispatches a Vatican courtesan, Damiata, to the remote fortress city of Imola to learn the truth behind the murder of Juan, his most beloved illegitimate son, she cannot fail, for the scheming Borgia pope holds her own young son hostage. Against a teeming canvas of Borgia politics, Niccolò Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci come together to unmask an enigmatic serial killer, as we learn the secret history behind one of the most controversial works in the western canon, The Prince.

The Malice of Fortune by Michael Ennis