I’m flattered to tell you that the sixth Nic Costa novel, The Garden of Evil, has been shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious crime award, the Theakston prize for crime novel of the year. It’s in classy company too as you can see from the announcement page here.
The Theakston is pretty much unique as far as I know in that it is awarded on the basis of online votes by the public. So if you’d like to cast a vote for the author of your choice just do so on the page. Of course I’d love it if that was for me, but with such a great selection of writers to choose from I fully understand if you want to pick someone else.
The winner will be announced at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival on Thursday July 23 – and I will be there for the event.
Unavailable in the United Kingdom for several years, David Hewson’s highly-praised first Italian novel will soon be back in print in a revised edition, with a new title, The Cemetery of Secrets.
First published in 2000 as Lucifer’s Shadow, the book tells the twin related stories of two sets of young people, in contemporary Venice and the same city in the early eighteenth century. With real historical figures such as Vivaldi and Canaletto flitting through the book is a twisting tale of music, passion and murder.
The book gained the ‘highest possible recommendation’ from Bookreporter.com and was hailed as ‘one of the best of 2004? by Deadly Pleasures. The Sunday Times described it as ‘richly enjoyable, sophisticated and beguiling entertainment’ while The Times declared, ‘Venice is painted beautifully, both then and now, and this would be a splendid book to read after you have taken the evening air in the Piazza San Marco, or when gliding down the Grand Canal.’
The book will be available in the UK on October 3 and serves as a companion piece to the fourth Nic Costa novel, The Lizard’s Bite, which features some of the same Venetian characters.
