About the Author

Chiara Dandolo

I grew up between languages. That is probably where these books began, long before I knew I would write them. When you live inside more than one language, you learn early that people do not simply say things. They choose how to say them, and the choosing reveals as much as the words.

Giulia Vidoni came from that recognition. I wanted a character who listens the way a musician listens, not just to the melody but to the structure underneath. Someone who hears when a voice is carrying words that do not belong to it. Someone whose skill is patience and precision, and whose workplace is as much the jeweler's bench as the university.

Cara Birkeland came from a different recognition, though a related one. I spent years watching the way people present themselves in social settings, the way charm operates, the way a person can be admired by everyone in the room and feared by the one person who knows them best. Cara is a forensic psychologist, not a linguist, but she reads the same kind of gap Giulia does: the distance between what is presented and what is true. Where Giulia hears the wrong word, Cara sees the wrong smile. I gave her Berlin because it is a city that understands the difference between a surface and what lies beneath it.

The Giulia Vidoni books are set in the places I know. Friuli-Venezia Giulia, where three languages meet at the edges. Trieste, where the bora comes off the Adriatic and the architecture remembers the Habsburgs. Venice, where every surface has been written on by someone. I write about these places because they are places where language is never neutral, where the question of who speaks and in what tongue has shaped families and towns and entire valleys for generations.

I write literary mysteries because the mystery form asks the same question I have always asked: what is really being said? In Giulia's world, the answer is in the pause, the wrong verb, the sentence that was constructed by someone thinking in a language other than the one on the page. In Cara's world, it is in the posture that holds too still, the story that is too well rehearsed, the grief that does not quite match what it claims to mourn.

I live in the Veneto.