The Ancestor

Product Description From the New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling author of the Angelology series comes a bewitching gothic novel of suspense that plunges readers into a world of dark family secrets, the mysteries of human genetics, and the burden of family inheritance.It feels like a fairy tale when Alberta  Bert Monte receives a letter addressed to Countess Alberta Montebianco at her Hudson Valley, New York, home that claims she s inherited a noble title, money, and a castle in Italy. While Bert is more than a little skeptical, the mystery of her aristocratic family s past and the chance to escape her stressful life for a luxury holiday in Italy is too good to pass up. At first, her inheritance seems like a dream come true: a champagne-drenched trip on a private jet to Turin, Italy; lawyers with lists of artwork and jewels bequeathed to Bert; a helicopter ride to an ancestral castle nestled in the Italian Alps below Mont Blanc; a portrait gallery of ancestors Bert never knew existed; and a cellar of expensive vintage wine for Bert to drink. But her ancestry has a dark side, and Bert soon learns that her family history is particularly complicated. As Bert begins to unravel the Montebianco secrets, she begins to realize her true inheritance lies not in a legacy of ancestral treasures but in her very genes. Review "[Trussoni] has created such a seductive alternative history...Skillfully layering significant myths from before the Common Era into the narrative, [she] makes it hard not to believe that anything is and was possible." --"Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Angelopolis" "A memoir that reads like a fairy tale...Entertaining." --"Kirkus Reviews on The Fortress" About the Author Danielle Trussoni is the author of Falling through the Earth: A Memoir, which was the recipient of the 2006 Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, was a BookSense pick, and was one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2006. Her first novel, Angelology, was published in thirty countries.