Postcards From the Mediterranean — Margaret Maron

Three short stories from the Mediterranean, featuring Lt. Sigrid Harald or her housemate, Roman Tramegra. All three were previously published, but collected here for the first time.

My first three years of marriage were spent in Italy, overlooking the Bay of Naples. By the time I returned, I had written several books about Lt. Sigrid Harald of the NYPD and her eccentric housemate, Roman Tramegra. He was only supposed to be a walk-on character who would fade away after that first book. Except that he kept popping up. He wanted to write crime novels and he wanted to pick Sigrid's brains for plots and procedures. It occurred to me that if he ever sold a novel, he would take the advance and fly straight to Italy, a country as colorful and extravagant as he himself. Happily, this gave me an excuse to fly back to Italy myself, to research certain details. In "Roman's Holiday," I thought it would be amusing to let him try to solve a mystery just as would the amateur detective he had created. A later trip let Sigrid solve an Italian mystery, too ("Murder at Montefugoni").

"El Tramegra" is set mostly in Spain, not Italy and the "postcards" are emails, not scenic bits of pasteboard, but not even the foreign keyboards can foil our intrepid Roman as he takes on a quixotic adventure.