About this book:

Venice, 1374. The Black Death is a tide that no wall can hold, and on the quarantine island of San Lazzaro, the night watch has just begun. Sister Isabella tends the sick with a nurse’s pragmatism and a scholar’s hunger for patterns, recording the secrets the official physicians miss. But when a merchant ship flying a false flag slips into the lagoon, she uncovers a coded map and a serpent-stitched purse—evidence of a conspiracy that doesn't just smuggle silk, but smuggles death past the Republic’s formidable defenses. In a city built on water and secrets, Isabella realizes the true plague may not be the flea, but the greed that opens the gates for it.

As the Doge’s edicts clash with the desperation of the quarantined, Isabella is pulled into a shadow war between the Council of Ten, a ruthless merchant guild, and an alchemist promising a cure that cannot exist. With a naive young physician at her side and a betrayal festering in the wards, she must navigate labyrinthine canals, forbidden grottoes, and the fever-dreams of the dying to find the source of the contagion before the forty days expire. The system was designed to contain the sickness; now, someone is using it to weaponize the cure.

Atmospheric and razor-sharp, *The Quarantine Watch at San Lazzaro* is a historical thriller where the clock is measured in tolling bells and the enemy is invisible. For fans of *The Name of the Rose* and *Year of Wonders*, this is a pulse-pounding descent into the birthplace of modern quarantine—where science battles superstition, duty battles survival, and one woman’s keen eye is the only thing standing between Venice and annihilation.