Fiorella De Maria Books In Order

Publication Order of Father Gabriel Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Fiorella de Maria
Fiorella de Maria was born in Italy of Maltese parents and grew up in Wiltshire, England. She attended Cambridge, where she got a BA in English Literature and a Masters Degree in Renaissance Literature, specializing in the English verse of Robert Southwell, S.J.

“The Cassandra Curse” won the National Book Prize of Malta (Foreign Language Fiction category).

What Fiorella loves about writing is the voyage into the unknown. She does not try to write too detailed of plans before she begins writing a book because she wants to be swept up into the adventure, like she would be if she were reading a novel for the first time. There’s something quite exciting about inhabiting an imaginative world where virtually anything could happen and where the characters you create have this power to surprise you from time to time.

Besides writing fiction, Fiorella is a qualified English Language teacher and is a respected bioethicist. She’s delivered papers and lectures at conferences all around the world.

“The Cassandra Curse” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2005. In the last days just before war engulfed one small Mediterranean island, the oldest son of this old Maltese family asked for his dad to bless his marriage, but instead was cursed. At the turn of the new millennium, the final descendant of the family, named Kristjana Falzon, comes back to her native Malta with her English fiance, determined to explain to him the destruction of her family through the events of that day.

Through converging stories about a working class family from Sliema and the Sant’Angelos, whose ancestors were noblemen and merchants, they witness the experiences of women and men across three different generations that endured poverty and displacement, a bitter wartime siege, the insecurities and hopes of the sixties, and the emergence of one independent nation state with some struggles of its own.

Women and men like Carmelina Buhagiar, this widow whose courage and talent held her entire family together. Alexandria Sant’Angelo, whose own violent upbringing drove her into exile, and one innocent young priest unwittingly caught in the cross currents of political and social unrest.

All of these flesh and blood characters combine to make this a nail biting must read. Fiorella delivers a passionate love story, one that is breathlessly racy, in this fantastic novel.

“Father William’s Daughter” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2007. Francesca Saliba’s dad dies in this cleverly conducted traffic accident when she was just eleven. Being the only witness, she knew that it was murder however just her English uncle, this West Country parish priest, believed the story. Her dad’s death marked the end of her Maltese childhood, because within just days, she gets spirited out of the country, with her passport had been revoked and she found herself living in the eccentric small world of the only relative ready to take her in: Father William Arrowsmith, the most English of men, and the most Catholic of priests.

Father William’s daughter tells this story about a refugee forced to begin a new life in the alien world of this English market town and traces her journey back home a decade later, where she starts her quest to figure out why her dad was murdered and who it was that betrayed him. However while Francesca and her long-suffering guardian revisit this murky post-independence world from her childhood, they’re forced into acknowledging that the truth could be much more elusive and more distressing than they ever could’ve imagined.

Told alternatively through Francesca’s eyes and the unwritten memoirs of Fr. William, it ultimately pays tribute to the most unlikely of friendships forged across generations and cultures, and the enduring power of friendship when all other loyalties become challenged.

“The Sleeping Witness” is the first novel in the “Father Gabriel Mystery” series and was released in 2017. In such an unusual murder mystery, the tranquility of Saint Mary’s Abbey gets shattered by a gruesome discovery of a crime in a cottage on abbey grounds. A war hero and foreign artist looking for refuge from the world’s been murdered. Marie Paige, the sickly and frail wife of the village doctor lies beside him, having been beaten into a coma.

The cops arrest Marie’s husband, convinced that they’re looking at a crime of passion. However Dr. Paige finds himself with quite the unlikely champion: Fr. Gabriel, this blundering yet brilliant Benedictine priest that believes in his innocence and is compelled to go searching for the truth.

In a country struggling to come to grips with the devastation from World War Two, even a secluded English village has got its share of broken lives and secrets. It’s not long before Fr. Gabriel and his companions find themselves embarking on this dangerous journey into the victims’ troubled war histories and one chapter of Europe’s bloodiest conflict which is almost too horrible to be acknowledged.

You get to know these characters quite intimately in this beautifully and masterfully written read. Readers found the mystery’s conclusion to be very interesting.

“The Vanishing Woman” is the second novel in the “Father Gabriel Mystery” series and was released in 2018. The priest detective attempts solving the riddle behind the most hated woman in town’s disappearance.

An embittered war widow and retired headmistress, named Enid Jennings, has got a talent for causing conflict and distress anywhere she goes. When Enid’s daughter witnesses her vanish right into thin air, she’s widely assumed to have lost her mind or been mistaken. Or worse, to have committed an act of foul play.

Enter Father Gabriel. Working off the principle that some tales are just too odd to have been fabricated, this priest sets out to figure out the whereabouts of this missing woman. With some help from the town’s physician, and facing hostility from the irascible Inspector Applegate, Father Gabriel delves into Enid’s past, and digs up the recent past of the entire village during the days of the Phony War, when invaders lay in wait across the Channel and crimes were a bit easier to conceal.