Greed

Marco Ferrante, founder of the Ferrante Foundation for the Preservation of Venetian Cultural Heritage, is found face-down on the floor of a deconsecrated church. A circle of seven Byzantine coins surrounds the body. A Latin word is written on vellum beside his right hand.Avaritia. Greed.The coins are not a trophy. They are a citation — Byzantine theology on the relationship between beauty, wealth, and the specific corruption that follows when an institution confuses the two.Mateo Padilla has been covering the Vatican for eleven years. He knows how institutions protect themselves. He also knows, standing at the threshold of the church at 5:58am, that what he is looking at is not a crime. It is an argument. And the man who made it has been building it for forty years.Commissioner Sonya Logan is already on the train. She read Rome correctly. She is reading Venice the same way.GREED is the second novel in the Between Heaven and Hell series — eight books, seven deadly sins, seven European cities, and one curriculum that is still in session.Where faith ends and desire begins, evil waits.