THE SINS OF SAINT VERONIKA

Vera Cassin authenticates disputed art collections for a living. She flies into difficult commissions, works through the documents with the particular precision of someone who has spent fifteen years making things give up what they’re hiding, and files the truth whether anyone wants it filed or not. She built her entire professional reputation on exactly that: knowing what she is looking at, what it is worth, and what the records say. She has never left a job unfinished.

Then she arrives at Villa Veronika — a crumbling baroque estate on a Sicilian island — and the man who receives her is not the person she was told to expect. He is, officially, dead.

Before Vera can get through the authentication on her own terms, there is a chapel that always smells of ash with no visible fire source inside it, seven portrait faces with their eyes gouged and repainted by someone who knew exactly what they were doing, a housekeeper who says the right thing and stops and never quite looks at the portrait in the second row, a dead man who answers her questions with technically accurate answers that are not the same as honest ones, and then — in a sealed recess behind the altarpiece, twelve years sealed in oilcloth — a transaction record in the patriarch’s own handwriting that explains what the dynasty did to an island fishing village and what the falsified collection was actually for.

She knows what she found. She is not going to tell him yet.

Orsino Veronika has spent twelve years being someone his family needed him to be instead of who he was — controlled, contained, and running out of patience with his own silence. She’s the first person in twelve years who has looked at him the way she looks at a disputed work: not to manage him, but to find out what he actually is.

She’s spent her career acting only when she has all the evidence. He’s spent twelve years waiting for the leverage that never quite arrives. A crumbling Sicilian estate with two centuries of buried crime is about to make both of them act before they’re ready.

Gothic romance with a forensic mystery spine, Mediterranean atmosphere, and a love story where the truth is the danger. The kind of book you read with the lights on and finish knowing exactly what you would have done.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance — Gothic sits at 8.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 100.5 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — consistent, proven demand in a category with room for new titles

→ Dual-category play with Romance — Mafia (13.7 sales-to-comp, Hot Mainstream) pulls from an even higher-demand pool simultaneously — two Hot Mainstream audiences, one package

→ Cross-sell to Romance — Dark Romance (27.4 sales-to-comp, Hot Cell) — the highest-efficiency category in all of romance; morally complex hero and power-imbalance tension give legitimate access

→ Gothic × Mafia hybrid fills an underserved lane — Mafia top 20 is overwhelmingly contemporary-urban; Gothic top 20 doesn’t carry this level of criminal-dynasty stakes; no dominant current competitor in this exact position

→ Sicilian island estate setting differentiates on the shelf — against a Gothic top 20 that clusters around English and Scottish country houses, the Mediterranean baroque aesthetic stands out at thumbnail size

→ Forensic heroine drives the plot — the mystery resolves through her expertise, not coincidence; hero-competence + heroine-competence is a proven social-share formula with strong BookTok traction

TROPES:
• Forced Proximity 
• Secret-Keeper Hero
• Enemies to Reluctant Allies to Lovers
• Slow Burn
• Buried Family Crime
• He’s Been Dead for Twelve Years
• Capable Heroine Who Matches the Dangerous Hero
• She Finds What She Wasn’t Supposed to Find
• The House Is Against Her
• She Keeps His Secret Before He Asks Her To
• Grand Gesture Hidden in Plain Sight
• She Stays Because She Chooses To

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / Medium Spice

Perfect for fans of: Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Sierra Simone, Katee Robert, and Kate Quinn