Jo Piazza is a novelist, journalist, and podcaster.

I read The Sicilian Inheritance (2024) mainly because I‘ve never been to Sicily. An unforgivable oversight on my part.

It kept me going. Both the modern day story of Sara, there for the first time. AND the story of her great-grandmother Serafina in the bad, old days when women were treated like chattel ➙ kept me going.

I’d almost place this book in the Romance genre.

Sara Marsala barely knows who she is anymore after the failure of her business and marriage.

On top of that, her beloved great-aunt Rosie passes away, leaving Sara bereft with grief.

But Aunt Rosie’s death also opens an escape from her life and a window into the past by way of a plane ticket to Sicily, a deed to a possibly valuable plot of land, and a bombshell family secret.

Rosie believes Sara’s great-grandmother Serafina, the family matriarch who was left behind while her husband worked in America, didn’t die of illness as family lore has it . . . she was murdered.

Thus begins a twist-filled adventure that takes Sara all over the picturesque Italian countryside as she races to solve a mystery and learn the story of Serafina—a feisty and headstrong young woman in the early 1900s thrust into motherhood in her teens, who fought for a better life not just for herself but for all the women of her small village. Unsurprisingly the more she challenges the status quo, the more she finds herself in danger.

Piazza wrote this fictional novel inspired by the real life murder of her great, great grandmother, Lorenza Marsala, more than a 100 years ago.