Summer's Lease

For most of her life she has found escape in detective novels and books on art, especially about the fifteenth-century Italian fresco painter Piero della Francesca.

The villa is conveniently located for visits to the artistic centres of Florence and Siena, and also to Urbino, a day's drive away across the "Mountains of the Moon", where what Kenneth Clark called the world's greatest small picture awaits Molly: Piero's "Flagellation".

She becomes more involved with the local town of Mondano and its inhabitants: an aristocrat, a wealthy socialite, and several ex-pats who all seem to be hiding something, and is intrigued about the identity of the villa's absent owner, whom she knows only as "S. Kettering".

The search for the reason behind the disappearing water and the corpse, and discovering who S. Kettering is, becomes an obsession which leads Molly across the "Mountains of the Moon" to encounter more than just the small painting.

To his contemporaries, Piero was admired as a mathematician and geometer as well as a painter, and today his paintings are celebrated for their serene humanism and use of geometric forms.