Blog Tour: Listen to Mother – L.J. Smith

Lesley Hamilton is starting a new life in Florence when she discovers a dead
neighbour. An inexplicable mistake leads her to Paolo Bianchi, an individual
unaffected by usual human emotions. His involvement in crime leaves him living in
the shadowy fringes of society where decisions are made for him. When he is left to his own devices, his actions lead to tragic consequences, not just for himself but also for all those lives he touches.

As Paolo’s life unravels, Gianfranco Valdi and his Caribinieri team must unpick the
threads that lead to Paolo and his connection with organised crime.

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Laura Jane Smith began writing seriously in 2019 when she took early retirement
after a 34-year career in education. She lives in Perthshire in Scotland, where she
enjoys gardening, walking, theatre and going to the cinema, as well as cycling and
cross-stitching.
Her interest in writing came not just from her own reading but also from the
process of teaching others about reading, writing and understanding the written word.
The ideas for her first novel came from her experiences in education and
travelling in Europe, as well as her enjoyment of a well-told psychological thriller.
She focuses on human behaviour and individual motivation when faced with life-changing events and difficult decisions.
Relationships are at the heart of the novels. The decisions made by the characters and the relationships they develop drive the plot. The inspiration for this first novel, Listen to Mother, came initially from a trip to Florence in 2011. However, the main inspiration was a desire for others to experience the world from the viewpoint of someone with highfunctioning autism whose struggles with the reality of life result in his joining a world in the shadows

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My thoughts: This was a really interesting way of writing a crime novel, setting it both before and after the central crime, giving the perpetrator all the opportunities to stop and reconsider his plan, and then showing the aftermath, the investigation, the pain wrecked on the victims’ families and the almost inevitable end for the killer.

Lesley has moved to Florence, a stunning city, with the intention of writing a novel, but discovering the body of a neighbour sets into motion a terrible chain of events. I’m not sure I’d agree with her actions and the decisions she makes, bringing into contact with a killer and also with the detective she falls in love with.

Paolo, our assassin, is a strange man, obsessive and still following instructions left by his dead mother (hence the title). It is only quite far into the book before anyone says that he’s autistic, and while his condition isn’t why he becomes a killer, it does govern how he goes about his job and the way in which he behaves when events get beyond him. I found him quite sinister, not because of his autism, more the stalking behaviour and the wearing of black leather gloves, even to do the gardening.

I liked Lesley and Diego, their deaths are awful, but the detectives who investigate were pretty decent and I like Gianfranco and Violetta a lot, I hope we see more from them in a future book.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.