The Gabellotto's Daughter

Some silences take a generation to break.

Sicily, 1873. When seventeen-year-old Giovanna Galbo finds her father murdered on the church bench at dawn — a black river stone set in each open palm — the whole town understands the message and no one dares repeat it. Her father was the gabellotto, the broker whose records could make or unmake a family. Someone forced those records to lie, and killed him to keep the lie buried.

Giovanna buries her grief instead of her suspicions. Over the years that follow she becomes something Sicily has no name for and no defense against: a woman who moves through the merchant houses of Palermo unremarked, gathering what powerful men let slip in front of a person they never think to fear. Quietly, patiently, she builds a network of the wronged and the watchful — I Veri, the True Ones — who leave a white stone where the powerful leave a black one.

Spanning three decades and two generations, The Gabellottos Daughter is a historical crime saga about silence and its cost, about the slow architecture of justice, and about a mother and daughter bound to a reckoning that will outlast them both.

The first book in the I Veri series.