Sibling Rivalry Played for Keeps

At times this book feels like one of the better seasons of Dynasty set in Renaissance Italy. There are fights for family power, adultery, borderline idiot husbands, unloved brides, over-indulgent fathers, trampy cousins; the only thing missing is the occasional catfight. With material like the Medici family of Florence, one expects a bit of entertainment and Caroline Murphy delivers. Murphy also acquits herself well as a serious historian.

The story of daddy’s-favorite Isabella de Medici Orsini has the drama and intrigue to sustain a book. Isabella is that rarity of Renaissance times – a woman who is not a ruling queen with a well-documented life. Caroline Murphy brings Isabella to live but more importantly, she brings the reader into Isabella’s life. We get a feeling for the rhythms, excitements and boredoms of life as a Medici princess. Isabella is not exactly a sympathetic character nor is she remarkable for anything beyond her birth but that in itself makes this book fascinating reading. It’s rare to know so much about a woman of those times who was neither a paragon of virtue nor a creature of great infamy.

Nasty gossip did attach itself to Isabella - stories accused of incest with her father and her brother – yet her murder went without official comment. In the epilogue Murphy makes the case that Isabella was killed for actions that had she been a man would have been tolerated. I have no difficulty believing there was a double-standard in 16th century Florence but Murphy’s stretching things a bit here. Helping your hare-brained cousin plot to murder her husband is going to rile up the family no matter what your gender.

Murphy’s style is clear and she does a remarkable job of weaving together the various sources into an enjoyable narrative. She does pad the story on occasion and several times she jumps around chronologically but the impact on the overall story is minor. She writes for a contemporary audience complete with mentions of Paris Hilton but doesn’t strain for popular references. This is is a well-written biography that I recommend to anyone interested in Renaissance history.

Through the Past Darkly

What must it be like to have not only a murder in the family but an unsolved murder at that? If the victim in question was your father who died before you were old enough to have meaningful memories of him the mystery would only deepen. It’s more than a whodunit – who was the murder victim anyway?

Zachary Lazar sets out not to find his father’s killers but to understand how a nice accountant living a life of middle-class ease got tangled up with shady land deals, political corruption and organized crime. The narrative device Lazar uses is to depict his father as a character in a novel, writing about his feelings and frustrations that led him to take a walk on the Phoenix wild side that in the early 1970s consisted of selling uninhabitable land to GIs in Japan. For something that skirts the edges of the Mafia and the corruption of a former presidential candidate, the scam at the heart of Evening’s Empire is surprisingly mundane and tawdry without ever being interesting. The scam and the murder are part of a labyrinth-like enterprise that does not lend itself to dramatic storytelling. Nor are the principles, for one reason or another, available to participate via interview. So two-thirds of the way through the author shifts to the first person to continue the search. I’m happy to report that Lazar does not turn this into a true-crime-travelogue aka “what happened to me while I was writing this book.” He sticks to the story only inserting himself fleetingly but meaningfully to remind the reader of the unbearable cost of any murder.

Whether you will enjoy this book depends on whether you like Lazar’s prose style and his narrative technique. This is not a class true crime - there is no tidy ending. Lazar does his best to explain the scam at the heart of the crime without appearing to explain it (no easy task he’s set for himself) but I never felt as if I understood it well enough to explain it to anyone else. What Zachary Lazar does very well is create the atmosphere of Phoenix in the early 70s. With a few sentences Lazar not only sets the scene, he can make you feel the desert heat and the texture of the vinyl poolside chairs.

For me little touches of brilliance like that and the risks Lazar takes were enough to give this book five stars. This is a story that truly deserves the description haunting - it stays with you long after you've read the last page. This book isn’t for everyone but if you don’t mind unresolved mysteries, Evening’s Empire is essential reading.