Isabella's dead. She must be, because she just found her own corpse in an alley. Now she'd quite like some answers, like who killed her, and how come she's never felt so alive? There's only one man who can solve such an impossible mystery: shoe maker and reluctant detective Lorenzo Valentini. But how does it relate to a farm worker who lived in the Casentino Valley over twenty years earlier? Will an attempt to divert the course of the Arno to win the war with Pisa succeed? And, most importantly of all, can Isabella afford Valentini's fee? Witness a murderous romp through Renaissance Italy in a tale of death, obsession, shoe making and war.