The Costa books came out of serendipity. I went to Rome to spend a week with the manuscript of Lucifer’s Shadow, thinking that would probably be the last novel I’d ever get published. I was about to be without a publisher and the climate was pretty grim for writers who hadn’t made it. In Rome I found myself taken by the city and the area I was staying near the Lateran. Around the same time the movie of Semana Santa was being made. I got the idea of writing another story similar to that: something dark, set in the Mediterranean. Rome seemed the obvious location.

Here are some photos I took at the time.

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