Joseph Orbi

The Lives of Felix V

At the heart of The Lives of Felix V beats a love story both fragile and relentless. When the young Damir Pavelić — a sensitive, guilt-ridden son of Croatia's wartime fascist leader — crosses the Atlantic aboard a luxury liner, he encounters Isabella, the luminous daughter of the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli. Their connection is instant and disorienting: Damir, haunted by the atrocities committed in his father's name, finds in Isabella something close to absolution — a reason to live beyond shame. Their courtship unfolds across continents and years, tangled in stolen phone calls, evasions, and the quiet anguish of two people who desperately want each other but are separated by circumstance, identity, and the weight of history. Running alongside this romance is another kind of love — Damir's fierce, almost mystical bond with Felix, a nameless infant he discovers abandoned on a rain-soaked mountain road in wartime Bosnia and raises as his own. That child, taken in and eventually shepherded by the powerful Vatican operative Father Draganović, carries with him a mystery that deepens with every chapter — his origins unknown, his destiny darkly hinted at, and the question of who he truly is hovering over the entire novel like a prophecy waiting to be fulfilled.

The international suspense surrounding these relationships is no mere backdrop — it is the architecture of the entire novel. Father Krunoslav Draganović, the real-life Croatian priest at the center of the Vatican's postwar escape network, serves as both protector and puppeteer, smuggling the Pavelić family from Croatia to Rome and eventually to Buenos Aires while navigating Cold War politics, papal intrigue, and Balkan blood feuds. The novel moves through the massacre pits of Jasenovac, the shadowed gardens of Castel Gandolfo, the gilded opera houses of Argentina, and the guerrilla-torn hills of Bosnia, weaving a world in which war criminals seek refuge behind cassocks, secret gold hoards fuel postwar conspiracies, and the boy Felix — raised at the center of Vatican power — becomes the subject of prophecy, surveillance, and forces far beyond his understanding. Joseph Orbi builds toward a climax that is as inevitable as it is devastating, making plain that history's most ruthless machinery does not pause for love — it arrives precisely when love is most vulnerable.

The Enormous Undertakings of Nestor Picol

From the ancient streets of Malta and the Vatican, to Rome, Lyon, Buenos Aires, and New York, The Enormous Undertakings of Nestor Picol by Joseph Orbi is a sophisticated, hilarious, and distinctive novel.

The Enormous Undertakings of Nestor Picol is a murder mystery, a comic novel, a love story, and an international thriller fused into a relentlessly entertaining narrative.

Driving the plot is the most unconventional of detectives, Captain Nestor Picol, and a cast of unforgettable characters that include—among many others—mysterious archbishops, cheeky Vatican altar boys, flying bananas, a bigger than life opera impresario, and a former army special forces operative fired from the Postal Service for atomizing a cat with pepper spray.

Simply put, The Enormous Undertakings of Nestor Picol is the most fun you will ever have with a serious book.

-- Maestro Monticelli tells a story: from Solace in the Pampas --

Cenacolo

In every man there is a Christ. In every man there is a Judas.

Cenacolo unfolds against one of history's most treacherous backdrops — the court of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, in the final years of the fifteenth century, where political intrigue, papal ambition, and the imminent invasion of the French king converge with the breathtaking audacity of a single artistic commission. At the center of the storm stands Leonardo da Vinci, enlisted by the Moor to paint the Last Supper on the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie, blissfully — and sometimes catastrophically — consumed by his search for the perfect faces of Christ and Judas while the world around him plots, poisons, and conspires. Joseph Orbi peoples this world with riotous invention: the young Machiavelli, sharp-tongued and already too clever for anyone's comfort, threading his way through courts and forests on behalf of Pope Alexander VI; the insufferable boy Salai, Leonardo's beloved apprentice and domestic chaos engine, who cannot cross a street without collecting trouble; and a cast of cardinals, courtiers, and cutthroats whose scheming gives the novel its propulsive, darkly comic energy. Orbi never lets history stiffen into textbook pageantry — he renders it loud, muddy, funny, and dangerous.

The suspense tightens masterfully as the novel builds toward the unveiling of the fresco, a ceremony that doubles as a political trap of breathtaking elegance. Bernardino da Corte, the Moor's own counselor, is revealed as a serpent in the palace — feeding forged intelligence to Rome, poisoning the princess with a box of sweets, and engineering the fall of Milan from within, all while maintaining the unruffled composure of a man who has simply done his patriotic duty. Machiavelli moves through it all like a man watching a fire he helped start, fascinated and coolly amused. And when the silk curtain finally drops from Leonardo's masterpiece and the room erupts — for reasons no one anticipated — Cenacolo from Joseph Orbi — the brilliant and controversial novel of suspense, intrigue, and forbidden love — delivers a punchline worthy of the gods: a joke five hundred years in the making, hiding in plain sight on the most famous wall in the world.

NOT a Matter of Faith

Not a Matter of Faith is a call to arms; a warning for parents to safeguard their children's sense of critical appreciation and judgment so they do not become targets of charlatans and smooth-talking psychopaths eager to exploit their willingness to believe nonsense.

It is a book that describes how peddlers of divine snake oil pick peoples' pockets, and what you, the reader, can do to fend them off.

Concise and focused, Not a Matter of Faith is a hole-puncher for religious arguments, fallacies and contradictions quoted by "those smiling others" who, empowered by psychotic belief, challenge our intelligence with: "It is a matter of faith."

A Lady of Influence

A recent widower, and prominent US Senator, marries for a second time. Bennett Collingwood, former director of the CIA, reads about it in the papers, and being well acquainted with the bride, raises the alarm.

"Hence it is that which none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies. None should be more liberally rewarded. In no other business should greater secrecy be preserved."
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Based on a true story, A Lady of Influence is an international thriller.

Beginning in 1947, the novel describes an investigation by FBI counterintelligence, as it follows former DCI Collingwood's lead into 70 years of political operations by the CIA against the People's Republic of China, and the unforeseen consequences of a particular operation that turned out too good to be true.