Alyssa Palombo Books in Order

If you want music and sweeping historical romance: The Violinist of Venice → The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence
If you want Renaissance Italy and sharper political intrigue: The Borgia Confessions → The Assassin of Venice
If you want something spooky and gothic: The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel
If you want her contemporary, band-centered side: Heavy Metal Symphony

Alyssa Palombo is a Buffalo, New York writer, and she still lives and works there. She studied English and creative writing at Canisius College, with a minor in music. She is also a classically trained mezzo-soprano who plays some piano, which helps explain why music feels so lived-in in her books.

Books and music seem to have grown up together for her.

Palombo has said she does not remember making one big decision to become a writer. She was the kid who wrote little stories for fun, and at 12 she started a first novel, sharing chapters with family as she went. Through middle school and high school she kept at it, sometimes scribbling stories when teachers thought she was taking notes.

One early turning point came when she read The Other Boleyn Girl in high school and realized historical fiction was the kind of work she most wanted to write. That interest led her to Canisius, which had a formal creative writing program. In college she began the book that became her debut, The Violinist of Venice, after a vivid dream about Antonio Vivaldi that stayed with her long after she woke up.

She started writing first, then chased the research hard.

While working on The Violinist of Venice, she read deeply about Venice and Vivaldi, and later traveled to Venice to see the city for herself. She wrote much of that first draft while still in college, and the manuscript went through years of revision before publication. That book, about gifted young violinist Adriana d'Amato and her forbidden relationship with Vivaldi, set a pattern that still feels central to her work: art matters, love matters, and the two do not always make life easier.

Readers who like Palombo usually seem to come back for the same mix of pleasures. The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence brings Renaissance Florence, Simonetta Cattaneo, and Botticelli into a story about beauty, desire, and the cost of being looked at. The Borgia Confessions moves into darker political territory, pairing Cesare Borgia with servant Maddalena Moretti to show how power works from both upstairs and down. Across these novels, Italy is more than a backdrop. It is the engine.

She is not locked into one lane, though. The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel shifts to Sleepy Hollow and turns a familiar side character into the heart of a gothic mystery, while The Assassin of Venice adds spies, courtesans, conspiracy, and a sharper thriller edge. Then there is Heavy Metal Symphony, her contemporary novel published under A.K. Palombo, which trades Renaissance streets for the modern music scene but keeps her old interests intact: ambition, performance, creative control, and messy love.

Off the page, Palombo sounds refreshingly like herself. She has written about loving travel, concerts, Halloween, hoodies, French fries, and heavy metal, and that mix of craft and specific personal taste makes her easy to picture as a person, not just a name on a cover. These days she is still writing from Buffalo, still following the pull of music and history, and still building stories around women who want more than the world is ready to hand them.