"The Medusa Amulet"

Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist, television writer, and the bestselling author of many novels and nonfiction books.

His newest novel, The Medusa Amulet, is a supernatural thriller based on the life and works of the Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith, Benvenuto Cellini. Like its predecessor, Blood and Ice, The Medusa Amulet mixes historical fact with dark fantasy, and takes its readers on a journey across continents and centuries, from the Medici court in Florence to the Coliseum in Rome, from the ramparts of the French Revolution to the innermost councils of the Third Reich.

Masello applied the Page 69 Test to The Medusa Amulet and reported the following:

It was dusk already, and the monumental sculptures in the square threw long shadows on the stones .... And Cellini, already an acknowledged master in so many arts, longed to make his own contribution to their august company. What the piazza needed was a bronze more perfectly modeled and chased and refined than any such statue ever done. Its subject? The hero Perseus....

Benvenuto Cellini was one of the greatest artists in Renaissance Italy, and his bronze statue of Perseus slaying the gorgon Medusa is still his most famous work. It stands today in the central square of Florence. But Cellini was also a wonderful writer, and his renowned autobiography was the starting point for my own novel. Cellini's book ends abruptly, uncompleted, and there are hints of necromancy in earlier portions of the manuscript. I took those hints, and that unfinished manuscript, and told my own story of his life -- and in mine Cellini creates an amulet with miraculous powers ... an amulet that my hero in the present day -- a young scholar at the Newberry Library in Chicago -- must find at all costs. The story takes place over nearly five hundred years, with stops at the papal courts in Rome, the French Revolution, the invasion of Paris in the Second World War. My movie agent billed it as a supernatural Da Vinci Code (I should be so lucky), but that's not a bad thumbnail description. If you like thrillers filled with art history and European intrigue, as I do, then The Medusa Amulet might be right up your alley.

Learn more about the book and author at Robert Masello's website.

The Page 69 Test: Blood and Ice.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue