Amado Mio: The Flying Cloud

By Larry Serfozo

At a Christie's Auction House bidding, mesmerizingly young and divorced beauty, Katalin K?lnoky, our dearest Amado Mio makes a surprisingly large offer for a recently discovered Goya painting, Woman Washing Her Feet. Katalin does not get the painting, but she rouses the attention of Geoffrey Coburn, an old and experienced auctioneer and a young and handsome forensic expert, Andrew Esterhazi, a descendant of the old Hungarian crown prince family. Dinner follows at Geoffrey's Kensington district palace and Katalin slowly, and most willingly gets dragged into the business of international artwork forgery and recovery and restoration of priceless masterpieces believed to be lost in the Second World War. Katalin's family also has a valuable painting, kept hidden from the greedy eyes of communist authorities for forty years. She would like to sell it too for extremely large amount. Unfortunately the painting's provenance is in doubt and she needs to enlist Geoffrey's uncanny skills. Later we meet Salvatore Sorbonesi, the old master forger from Trieste, Italy. Salvatore lives and has his atelier in the garret of Geoffrey's house and has an incredibly charming, but shy and reclusive daughter, Ani di Gracie. Salvatore is revengeful for old imagined or real atrocities his family suffered and willing to accept the help the Devil himself, in the person of Frano Gospodin, a rich man and the owner of the Flying Cloud clipper. Like the Flying Dutchman, Frano must travel the seven seas and is allowed to come ashore only once in seven years where his curse might be lifted by the love of a young maiden. Frano asks Salvatore for the hand of his daughter, but Ani di Grace's love interest unexpectedly lies elsewhere.Will the Devil truthfully help the revengeful or there is a price tag that nobody is willing the pay.A spellbinding plot follows with so many shady characters and incredible money making schemes that is impossible to list in a short summary and the outcome is profoundly unpredictable. Former professional engineer and real estate investor turned fiction writer, Larry Serfozo is the author of fifteen novels and two volumes of short stories. He lives in Florida and has a second home in Darien, Connecticut. In this novel Larry approaches a delicate, an almost forbidden subject, and tries to present antagonistic point of views and opinions, and hidden deep emotions, and tries to expose predisposed concepts and false philosophies and begs for the understanding of the intelligent and open minded reader.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1549992961
• ISBN13: 9781549992964
• Release Date: October 2017
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 167 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"