Archive for January, 2008

• The new Costa novel is hailed as ‘the best yet’

  The sixth Nic Costa novel, The Garden of Evil, is now out and winning rave reviews. The Daily Express describes it as ‘even more gripping than its predecessors’.
  Margaret Cannon, in the Toronto Globe & Mail, says the series is one of her favourites, and adds, ‘The Garden of Evil is the best book so far [...]

  Posted on 28/01/08 | no comments | read on

• The next Rome book makes an early entrance

  Fans of Nic Costa in the UK can now expect a second book during 2007 after the sellout of the latest title, The Garden of Evil, in the first week of publication. The next in the series, Dante’s Numbers, will now go on sale through Pan Macmillan in the UK on October 3, 2008, to [...]

  Posted on 30/01/08 | no comments | read on

• Dante’s Numbers, UK hardback

  The seventh Nic Costa novel, Dante’s Numbers, will make its world debut on October 3, 2008, when it is published in hardback by Macmillan.
  

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• The Garden of Evil, US debut

  The first hardback edition of the sixth Nic Costa novel, The Garden of Evil, will be published in the US by Delacorte on July 29, 2008.
  

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• Dante’s Numbers… some locations

  Here are some of the key locations in the seventh Nic Costa novel. Film buffs with an eye for detail may be able to guess one of the elements of the book from these shots.

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• The Villa of Mysteries: out now in Poland

  WILLA MISTERIÓW

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• A Spanish debut… my first novel

  Holy Week in Spain… and a murderer is loose. Academic Maria Gutierrez can see something in his ways that the police are missing. But her insight does nothing to help her popularity in the force-and draws her to the attention of the killer.

  The Angel Brothers, two controversial modern artists, are found dead in a southern Spanish city, in a killing that emulates a famous painting. Visiting academic Maria Gutierrez was supposed to be an observer to the police investigation. But her own past in the city soon puts her one step ahead of the cops… and in the killer’s sights.

  Translated into many languages, and a continuing summer hit in Germany, Semana Santa marked my world debut as a novelist with a dark and powerful tale set in a region of Europe most English language writers ignored at the time.

  In 2000 Semana Santa was filmed, mainly on location in Seville, starring Mira Sorvino, below. The movie, in which David had no involvement, went straight to DVD in most territories. It is still available under the title The Angel of Death in the US, and as Semana Santa in Europe.

  

  Posted on 29/01/08 | no comments | read on

• A tale of two eras

  Palo Alto, northern California, 1975
  
  A child goes missing in northern California. Twenty years later, people want to know why, and the past begins to unravel for a group of former friends who thought they’d escaped it forever.

  Seattle 1995

  A group of students retire to a remote house to experiment with LSD. One, Michael Quinn, kidnaps a child. A body is found. And for the rest of the group the battle to escape justice begins.

  Twenty years on, with Quinn about to be unexpectedly released from jail, a mysterious young Englishwoman, Joni Lascelles, arrives in the city, asking questions about the kidnapping, unravelling the past for those who thought it was long dead. The horror of the past comes to engulf the present, leaving no-one untouched by its power. Turn by turn, shifting effortlessly between two eras twenty years apart, the story is played out with relentless compulsion to an overwhelming climax.

  Epiphany was my second book. It was completed it in the summer of 1995 while he was still waiting for Semana Santa to be published. At the time he was spending a lot of journalistic time visiting San Francisco and Seattle. The contrast between the two - California with its lost innocence, and Seattle with its hard, uncompromising Nineties materialism- was what provoked the book. It’s a complex, ambitious piece of work.

  If it gets republished I’d take something of a scalpel to parts because I think it could do with some editing. But I’m still pretty pleased with this work. I’ve written nothing quite like it since and, to be honest, it’s pretty damn scary.

  John Fowles on acid. The Guardian

  The atmosphere of mystery, menace and guilt is sustained with great skill, building tension to a seismic explosion as ghoulish characters squirm to escape a relentless past returning to destroy them. Daily Telegraph

  David Hewson has an altogether wider range of literary and cultural reference than most thrillers. Impressive… Esquire

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• A millennial thriller

  It’s hot, unbearably hot, in a way that makes people wonder if the world isn’t changing fundamentally for the worse. Back in 1996 when this book was first started, that seemed an unusual idea. Today no-one would question it.

  Solstice is a book about man’s neglect of his own planet and a group of people who decide to take matters into their own hands. A core of hardened eco-terrorists have taken control of a Cold War weapon developed in secret by the Reagan administration. It gives them the power to turn the focus of the sun’s radiation on any part of the world they choose.

  Michael Lieberman, a renegade scientist who knows the leader of the gang from his academic work in the past, is reluctantly force to take on the role of their opponent, trying to stop their deliberate attempt to force an environmental disaster on some of the world’s major cities.

  Solstice presaged the emergence of terrorists who were willing to sacrifice their own lives for no other end except to harm others. It also foresaw the use of the then new technology of the internet to foster havoc among agencies grounded in the practices of another era. This is a dystopian image of a damaged future, one that persuaded Time Warner to take me on as a future techno-thriller writer in the vein of Michael Crichton. But that just wasn’t me… though I still have fond memories of this book.

  Independence Day reimagined for grown-ups. A smart synthesis of science fiction and planet-in-peril cliffhanger. Sunday Times

  A remarkably well-written thriller… Hewson’s science is both complex and authentic. And-perhaps even more impressive for a techno-thriller-so are his characters. Kirkus Reviews

  Richly imagined… as high-tech concepts go they don’t get much hotter than this. Michael Cordy, author of The Miracle Strain 

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• A tale of the English countryside

  Native Rites is a book about a set of people who will do whatever it takes to safeguard their own, precious, privileged existences. A young couple move to a new rural home. Miles commutes to the city each day leaving his American wife Alison to get to know the locals.

  One September day they both visit the ancient bonfire ritual. Maybe Alison was drunk. Maybe not. But she felt sure something terrible happened, and that at least some of those close to her knew it too.

  Is she paranoid? Or is there really some dark conspiracy happening in this small piece of paradise? Alison is determined to find out, whatever the cost, however much the truth may shatter her illusions about the cosy, comfortable green heaven she’s found herself in.

  Native Rites asks how far we would go to defend our notion of Englishness. Answer: as far as we need.

  The landscape in which the book is set is still glorious, and hopefully a little too remote for the house builders and sightless urban politicians of England to despoil it soon. And you can visit without fear of winding up in the middle of some secret, sacrificial rite. Take a copy of Rites to the area of east Kent, between Wye, Folkestone and Canterbury, and you will encounter strange commons called Minnis, and beautiful remote villages that look as if they haven’t changed for centuries. You may even bump into the occasional author too.

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