The Contarini Heir

Twenty years later, a box arrives containing everything her father owned — except the six months before he died.

What is in the box instead is a brass key, and a single word underlined twice in a hand she would know anywhere.

The novel

The Contarini Heir

Hannah Marsh was eight years old when her father drowned under the Ponte dei Tre Archi. Twenty years later she is a journalist herself, and she goes to Venice under a magazine assignment and a name that is only half a lie.

Lorenzo Contarini knows exactly who she is before she is shown through his door, and gives her a room in the palazzo anyway — which is either the most generous thing anyone has ever done for her, or the most efficient way to watch someone.

What Hannah expects to find is a cover-up. What she finds is a house in which four people have spent twenty years being scrupulously kind to one another and telling the truth to no one — and a question, underneath all of it, that nobody in either family has been willing to ask since 1996.

Somebody has been waiting a very long time for one of them to ask it.

The Contarini Heir

Start here — free

The Second Furnace

Ten years before the novel opens, on an island of glassworks across the water, something happens that neither family will name again.

It is the question the Contarini house has spent twenty years not asking. The prequel novella is yours free — no purchase, nothing to cancel. It is the shortest way to find out whether this voice is for you.

Download the novella

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A Venice out of season: November fog, shuttered shopfronts, water a foot higher than it should be.

For readers of Lucinda Riley & Kate Morton

Out 19 January 2027

Pre-order opens 20 November

Notify me the day it opens

One email, with the link, on the morning it goes live — and nothing else that week. The ebook arrives first, with the paperback alongside it.

Three books

The Contarini Trilogy

January 2027

The Contarini Heir

Hannah comes to Venice for her father, and stays for a family that has agreed on a version of events.

Book Two — written

The house answers

What a household does once someone inside it has started telling the truth.

Book Three

To come

The last of the silence, and what it costs to put it down.

The author

Alessandra Marsh writes about families who have decided what happened — and about the people who arrive later and ask anyway.

Alessandra Marsh is a pen name