Dante’s Numbers: the seventh Nic Costa novel

Dante’s Numbers, the new Costa book, is now available in the UK and launches in the US next March. The story begins in the park of the Villa Borghese where a glittering audience has assembled for Rome’s cinema event of the year, a movie of Dante’s Inferno, one that has come to be surrounded by controversy.

Then tragedy strikes out of the blue, and the starry affair ends in violence and confusion… and the loss of the death mask of Dante Alighieri that Costa’s team were supposed to guard.

Amid the recriminations the cinema circus moves on to an American premiere in San Francisco. Outraged that the Carabinieri have stolen the principal investigation, Leo Falcone manages to take his team across the Atlantic too for the first time. There they find themselves in a world both familiar and strange. Is the movie dogged by fanatics outraged that the original work has been ruined by the movie? Are disgruntled backers behind the continuing attacks on the famous cast?

Or is something darker and more disturbing happening, something that only Teresa Lupo can see? A link with another cultural icon, Hitchcock’s famous movie Vertigo, made in San Francisco fifty years before?

The first review of the book has appeared in Dutch, through the Nu news organisation, written by the well-known Dutch reviewer Anne Jongeling. It concludes…

It remains a wonder how Hewson consistently links interesting art history, architecture and culture to interweave them with crime and psychological tension. In this seventh book, in which Dante’s complex heritage serves as a guiding principle serves for a thriller, it is clear that Hewson is one of the greatest writers in this genre at this moment. Tremendous work. Five stars.

The work has received the praise of some of the world’s top authors. 

Jeffery Deaver writes…

The return of Nic Costa is a  true cause for  celebration! Dante’s Numbers is a literate,  page-turning tale that finds our  hero–one of the most appealing in  crime fiction — zipping between two of the  most iconic cities in the  world: Rome and San Francisco. Hewson is a daunting talent — a writer  who is master stylist, who respects the audience’s  intelligence and  who effortlessly keeps the thrills coming a mile a minute.

Douglas Preston, author of The Monster of Florence and Blasphemy, and a onetime Italy resident adds…

One of my all-time favorite fictional detectives is David Hewson’s Nic Costa, and Dante’s Numbers brings Nic for the first time to American shores. From the opening scene of murder and mayhem at a movie premiere to the final, mind-blowing surprise, Dante’s Numbers is an elegant, clever, and terrifying tale of intrigue and murder involving Dante’s first circle of Hell and Hitchcock’s classic film Vertigo. An outstanding novel.

Steve Berry, best-selling author of The Venetian Betrayal, says…

David Hewson is one of the finest thriller writers working today.  A born stylist.  Dante’s Numbers is politically wise, multi-dimensional, and psychologically intuitive.  Action braids suspense on nearly every page, creating a reader’s delight from beginning to end.  A superb effort by a master storyteller.

And David Morrell, author of First Blood and Creepers, writes…

Dante’s Numbers is action-packed suspense at its smartest and most gripping.  Transplanting Nic Costa and his fellow Italian detectives to the dizzying world of Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a master stroke from a brilliant author. It’s impossible not to be swept up in the memorable, compelling world that is David Hewson’s specialty.