The King's Agent

by Donna Russo Morin

[elysium]

Battista della Palla is an art collector, or a thief, for the king of France. His job is to collect valuable paintings and sculptures for the king. He is in a mission to find a mysterious sculpture which is believed to have special powers when he meets mysterious woman named Aurelia. Aurelia has been living as a ward of Marquess of Mantua and her life has been very sheltered but she is a woman with secrets.

Before I started this book I thought this would be straight-forward historical fiction and not so much a mystery book with the quest of finding the sculpture. I haven’t read much about Italy and I enjoyed learning more about the country. The book is a take of Dante’s Inferno and video game The Legend of Zelda and I’m not familiar with either of them and I felt like I was missing way too much stuff. Battista and Aurelia travels through "Hell", "Purgatory" and "Heaven" finding clues within paintings and from Dante’s work. The stuff with Hell, Purgatory and Heaven went little too much religious side that I lost interest and I’m not good with this mystery thing anyway.

I loved seeing the relationship growing between Battista and Aurelia. Aurelia had been living very sheltered life and hadn’t know freedom and she grows so much with Battista’s crew and seeing the world. I also liked Battista’s crew and their friendship between them.

While the book was bit hard to get into at first, I still enjoyed it. I just wish I was more familiar with Dante so I could have understood more. But this made me even more curious about the author’s previous book To Serve a King which I’ve wanted to read.