Venice Black by Gregory C. Randall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Venice Black is a good start to the new Alex Polonia Thriller series. I received an early copy via NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Alex has dreamed of going to Venice all of her life and finally gets a chance to visit during Carnivale. Marika has visited Venice before but her current visit is not just a vacation. She is there to try to unmask a war criminal publicly to the world during a public event and wants the U.S. to back her and those she wants to unmask are hot on her trail. Alex has not come from the U.S. quite on her own either and given they are mirror images of each other there are competing threats to both Marika and Alex.

Venice Black started out pretty heavy and the thrill of their always being some form of action works really well. One of the things I thought worked really well was giving the history of the Croatian area and the war as well as some of the items we all saw in news coverage about the war as it was happening. The reader also gets introduced to the beauty of that region as well as that of Venice. I recognized all of the spots in Venice and could picture them in my mind which made the story more interesting. I was fascinated by Alex and Marika being mirror images and wished that had been fleshed out a bit more. Although the ending was exciting, I was not totally happy with how things ended for some of the characters, especially if their story ends in this book. But, Alex was drawn detailed enough to get a good feel for her and her portion of the story ends in a manner that let's the reader know that more is to come. I will definitely be sticking with this series.