vaporetto, n: A motorized water-taxi; steam engine. Commonly used in Venice, Italy.

In a city sustained by a miracle,a woman with an unfathomable past and a man with an uncertain future are about to engage in a romance that will transcend the ordinary boundaries of love and life.

Venice is echoing with the voices of all its old ghosts. Beneath the city's exterior beauty--sundappled canals, charming gondolas, and splendid piazzas--is a world of bone-chilling cold, dank alleyways, and a tradition that yearly marks a Holiday of Death. Cloaks and masks, disguise and intrigue, are a time-honored way of life in this familiar yet unknowable city in which Jack Squire, a currency trader on assignment from Washington, D.C., has taken up residence. On one particular autumn night, swirling with damp mist and moving shadows, Jack finds himself in a campo teeming with stray cats. There he meets Caterina, a woman bearing the sadness of centuries, whose strangeness immediately possesses him and whose past eludes and controls him.

Vaporetto 13 is a relentless and mesmerizing novel of one lover's search for truth and the haunted city in which he finds it.