Now in Print – The Appointment: A Mauro Bruno Detective Series Thriller
When I come up with a title, it’s usually descriptive of what the reader is about to encounter. The Appointment is no exception—but in more ways than you might expect. This isn’t a story about an appointment someone keeps or misses. That would be far too simple for one of my novels.
The title carries several meanings, and they run deeper than the surface suggests. Most literally, characters throughout the book keep appointments they never chose—a recurring irony that runs the length of the story. On a more thematic level, every major character has an appointment with the consequences of choices they set in motion, whether they see them coming or not.
But the most personal meaning belongs to Mauro Bruno and his new bride, Maria. They have an appointment of an entirely different kind, one deferred again and again by loss, danger, and circumstances that seem to conspire against two people already carrying their own separate griefs. That’s the novel’s emotional spine and the title’s third meaning.
Bruno and his team, backed by Lamberti and Acardi, shine in this action-packed thriller set primarily in Sicily. Enjoy the ride.
A full description of the novel is below:
Italy’s most classified intelligence archive has been breached by a man the world believes is dead. A deadly, fast-mutating pathogen is already on its way to Moscow. And somewhere in Rome, a professional assassin is calibrating an eight-hundred-yard shot at Italy’s president—while the Kremlin watches and waits.
Pia Lamberti, Italy’s intelligence chief, has spent her career in the shadows so ordinary people never have to know how close to catastrophe the country comes. This time, threats arrive simultaneously from every direction, and behind them all stands the same hand: Vladimir Putin, whose determination to secure a permanent foothold in Italy has made the country’s president, its secrets, and its sovereignty expendable.
Private investigator Mauro Bruno and his team are drawn into the storm’s eye—racing with stolen biological samples along Sicily’s back roads, eluding the Mafia, the SVR, and a Russian special-forces unit intent on leaving no witnesses. But Lamberti has engineered something no amount of Russian firepower can stop: a trap so precisely constructed that pursuing it will cost the Russian leader everything—including his life.
What Putin does not know—what almost no one knows—is that Lamberti did not merely set a trap. She set an appointment. And he has already kept it.
The Appointment is a relentless thriller about power, survival, and the kind of revenge that arrives not with a weapon but with a handshake.