SYNOPSIS:

After struggling to find the inspiration to start her next novel, writer Vanessa Brigs takes the suggestion from her agent to use the earnings of her first novel to travel to the city of Venice, Italy, much to the protest of her family. Upon arrival, she is at first entranced to be finally be at the city of her dreams but is disheartened at the thralls of tourists crowding the spaces. During a visit to a chapel at night, a troupe of masked performers dance in the square. In the crowd’s confusion Vanessa falls and hits her head against the church steps. Before she passes out she sees a blurred vision of a dark, masked figure looming over her form while in the distance another figure drags an onlooker away. She wakes up in the hospital with only a mild concussion but is kept overnight. There she learns that people have been disappearing off the streets which local authorities attribute to latent mafioso activity. Vanessa tells a nurse about what she saw the night before. The day that she is released, she starts to notice people dressed in strange garb wandering among the normal crowds, some writhing in agony or riddled with disease. When they do not respond to her voice or touch, she begins to recognize them as people from the various grim tales of the city she’s heard all her life. Fear mounts as the visions grow more gruesome and horrifying, depicting various incidents from Venice’s haunted history. The masked figure from her first vision watches her silently, pointing towards her before vanishing. In a panic she runs back to her B&B only to find her belongings ransacked and an ominous symbol carved into the wall above her bed. The aged owner tells her that no police can help her now; ‘Corvos’ has its eyes on her. Vanessa dives head first to find any information regarding Corvos, and guidance from the various ghosts of Venice including the masked man, who she calls Sia, lead her to Adriano, the outcast scholar who wrote about Corvos. He tells her that Corvos came from a group of plague doctors in the medieval times that experimented on live, healthy human subjects in hellish ways to discover the full capacities of the human body. Once believed to be hunted down and turned to myth, Corvos is alive and thriving. Only by listening to the stories of the dead can Vanessa hope to survive to escape Venice alive and bring this circle of death to a final close.