The Kiss of Death

Love her or loathe her (and Marcus Sedgwick is the latest of many writers who seem to do both), Venice has provided a beautiful but sinister setting for many novels and stories. This one is set in the eighteenth century. The young man Marko has come to the city to search for his father, a doctor, who has disappeared while treating a sick friend, Simone, a Venetian glassmaker. Marko is responding to a message from Simone’s daughter, Sorrel, whose father is still desperately ill. Trying to find Marko’s father and save Sorrel’s, they join forces with Peter, the hero of Sedgwick’s earlier novel My Swordhand is Singing. Peter is now an old man, but kept youthful and strong by the enchanted sword with which he pursues his old enemy, the Shadow Queen, who keeps her own youth and beauty by feeding, vampire-like, on the strength of others. It is the Shadow Queen, so it proves, who has brought misfortune to both Sorrel’s father and Marko’s.

The novel is written in short snappy chapters full of violent action, but the language is curiously flat and commonplace, straining for effect and unequal to the demands of the melodramatic narrative. The main characters, too, are sketchily drawn. What really interests the author is Venice itself. When the Shadow Queen is finally exposed, she proves to be a woman called Venetia. Like the city, in this novel, she is ancient, ugly and evil beneath a deceptively beautiful exterior. And when finally destroyed by Peter, she sinks to her death in the lagoon, as Venice itself is doomed to do in the end.

The incomparable city, and this supernatural vampire who personifies her, are the only real star turns in an otherwise disappointing novel.