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A death in the Vatican begins Nic Costa’s stunning debut

It’s a scorching summer in Rome. Sara Farnese sits in the Vatican Library. The streets are deserted. A man walks towards her. He is familiar. He is carrying a blood-stained bag…

Stefano’s left arm, the one holding the weapon, swept the table, swept everything on it, the precious volume of Apicius, her expensive notebook computer, down to the hard marble floor with a clatter. He said in a loud voice that was half crazy, half dead, ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.’

As the media gathers and Vatican officials close ranks, a young detective is sent to the forefront of the case. Nic Costa is the son of an infamous Italian Communist, a connoisseur of Caravaggio, and a cop who barely looks his 27 years of age. Thrust into the heart of a killing spree that will rattle his city down to its ancient bones, Nic begins to see a pattern in the killings that follow, murders that seem to mimic the grisly martyrdoms of the early Church.

Racked by personal anxiety over his dying father, Costa starts on the long journey to uncover the truth about these horrific crimes, whatever the cost, whatever the pain. From the inner quarters of the Vatican, desperate to hide a financial embarrassment, to the poorer, squalid bed-sits where the city’s immigrants try to eke out a living, Costa takes on any who crosses his path, however influential, however damaging the cost to his career.

Shunned as the son of a Communist, treated with suspicion by many of those around him, Costa relies on his own intelligence and integrity to find a way into the life of the mysterious Sara Farnese, and unlock the key to the case. But it’s a journey that comes with a terrible risk, and a cost he can never foresee.

…breathtaking… a dark delight, a story that one is compelled to read at one sitting while simultaneously wishing it will never end.’ Bookreporter

Outsized, eccentric characters, a complex story and an abundance of historical detail make this engrossing book more than just another cookie-cutter, religious-nut serial killer thriller. Publishers Weekly

Let me tell you, this is great stuff… Praise be! Washington Post

A Dionysian mystery in modern Italy

It’s spring in Rome. Nic Costa is just back at work after the cataclysmic events of A Season for the Dead, with a new partner, Gianni Peroni, a disgraced vice inspector bounced down to the ranks. And on the edge of the city an American couple make a discovery that will rock the city. As the jacket says…

The Villa of Mysteries appropriates the beauty and savagery of classical Rome and sets it off against the corruption and sleaze of the present day.

Teresa Lupo, a maverick pathologist, thinks she has the victim of an ancient pagan ritual on her hands. Inspector Leo Falcone, however, kno ws this case is recent history and one that desperately needs a solution. So begins an investigation that will take the police deep into the dark underworld of Rome’s most disturbing and sinister secrets.

Emilio Neri, the local mafia boss, seems to be one of the keys to the mystery, and he can’t even trust his own wayward son. Retired US mobster Vergil Wallis is another key player who’s reluctant to talk. Meanwhile, someone is trying very hard to kill the pathologist. And now another beautiful young woman has gone missing in familiar circumstances.

The second book in any series is always important. It needs to lay the foundations for the stories, and the characters, that follow. Unlike A Season for the Dead, this book shifts the viewpoint from beyond Nic Costa alone, to those around him, men and women with more years in law enforcement, more than a touch of cynicism in some cases… and a habit of catching their breath when Costa, bright, young, incorruptible, comes on the case.

This is a terrific novel by a fine emerging British talent. Toronto Globe and Mail

A complex and satisfying mystery from a master plot maker. Booklist

…imagine the deceptively relaxed atmosphere of Donna Leon’s Brunetti novels mixed with the darkness of Ian Rankin’s Rebus sequence. Excellent. Ink

A riveting tale of revenge brought to life by sharp characterisation and powerful dynamics. The Good Book Guide

Another world beneath the streets of Rome

A superb mix of history, mystery and humanity. Booklist

This is definitely among this spring’s must-read crime fictions. Calgary Herald

If you are one of those individuals who believe there are very few writers left who can make you sit up and applaud, be forewarned. You’ll be putting your hands together in appreciation of David Hewson! Bob Walch, I Love A Mystery

David Hewson has a superb sense of pace and place, his characters feel real, and he writes a page-turner detective story like no other. Choice

…a sophisticated and original thriller that cements David Hewson’s burgeoning reputation as one of crime writing’s most exciting talents. Mystery and Thriller Magazine

It begins on one of Rome’s least-known hills, the Aventino, in the public piazza fronting the mansion of the Knights of Malta. There a curious keyhole to the knights’ estate reveals an astonishing view, a direct line across the Tiber to the dome of St. Peters in the distance.

For seven-year-old Alessio Bramante the act of peeking through the keyhole on his way to school each day is a ritual, a way of establishing a bond with his difficult, distant father, one of Rome’s most famous archaeologists, Giorgio Bramante. Then one day, after an unexpected visit to one of Giorgio’s underground excavations, Alessio disappears. A group of students who had slipped into the site, an ancient Mithraic temple, attract the blame. A tragedy occurs. Alessio is never found, and it’s his father who goes to jail.

Fourteen years later, in an arcane shrine by the Tiber known as the Little Museum of Purgatory, a tee-shirt belonging to Bramante’s son begins to show fresh bloodstains. No one can understand how the marks have appeared behind the glass.

Soon it becomes apparent that the newly-released Giorgio Bramante is bent upon a vicious and terrifying revenge on all those he blames for the loss of his son, and numbers Inspector Leo Falcone, a member of the original investigating team, among his targets. In the depths of the labyrinth he knows better than any man, a distraught father seeks his vengeance against those he hates.

Nic Costa, watching Falcone move relentlessly into the man’s deadly grip, realises the answer to the deadly present must lie in solving a cold case that, like the forgotten Alessio Bramante, has long been regarded as dead and buried for good.

The Pantheon under snow

It’s approaching Christmas in Rome and snow is falling in a way that only happens every twenty or thirty years. The city is soon paralysed by an unseasonal icy grip, and in the dark corners of the Pantheon a grim and mysterious story begins to unfold.

Nic Costa and his partner Gianni Peroni are called to reports of an intruder. Instead they find a woman’s naked body, scarred in a geometric pattern. Almost immediately they are met by a team from the FBI determined to take over an investigation into what they claim is a killer murdering American tourists around the world, in ways which link back to the mystical structure of the Pantheon itself.

But one agent, Emily Deacon, has a different story to tell, one that has a tragic personal dimension. Through her and an elusive Iraqi girl Laila, only witness to the death in the Pantheon, Nic Costa is pulled relentlessly into the world of the Iraq war and the shadowy secret agents whose job was to penetrate the regime of Saddam Hussein before the armed forces attacked.

Soon he is aware that there is a conspiracy at the heart of these deaths that runs back to Washington, and the past of Emily Deacon’s dead father, a tangle of connections he has to unravel, even if it comes at a considerable personal and professional cost.

A madman is loose in the frozen winter landscape of Rome, and as Costa soon realises, he is one the American agents know only too well.

Voted one of the top ten crime novels of 2006 by Booklist, the influential magazine of the American Library Association.

…the historical detail gives the proceedings a tasty complexity comparable to Pérez-Reverte, but what really makes the novel work is the interplay between the anti-establishment Roman cops. Booklist

…totally compelling, one of those rare thrillers which emphasis character over action, although Hewson acquits himself admirably in that department as well. Mystery Scene

Hewson’s solid writing and multidimensional characters command attention from start to finish of this smart, literate thriller. Publishers Weekly

This is the third novel in this Roman cop series, and I’m hooked. Toronto Globe and Mail

Exile in La Serenissima: the Romans go to Venice

…wonderfully complex and finely paced… newcomers as well as series fans will be enthralled. Publishers Weekly, starred review

This is another great novel by a fine author. Toronto Globe and Mail

David Hewson may well be the finest mystery writer of our time. Bookreporter

…told with dashing style, in atmospheric set pieces that capture the theatrical grandeur of Venice and the pockets of miserable squalor behind its splendid facade. New York Times

In a dilapidated glass furnace off the island of Murano the fire races out of control. Two people are dead, and for Leo Falcone, exiled to Venice, with Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni, the question is whether he’s dealing with one murderer or two.

For Costa, life in Venice is more perplexing on other fronts too. His relationship with Emily Deacon is deepening, and she is missing the law enforcement work she’s abandoned for a different, quieter career. Slowly, the sluggish world of the lagoon begins to enfold the Romans in its sinister grip, as they try to untangle the complex family ties of the tragic Arcangeli family on a private island falling into ruin.

The Lizard’s Bite is in part a companion piece to the earlier standalone novel, Lucifer’s Shadow, bringing several characters from that story into the tale of murder, betrayal and deceit which Costa and his colleagues must unpick in the heady, close heights of the Venetian summer.

The Venetian police turn to the Romans to wrap it up quickly and cleanly, in time for the English tycoon, Hugo Massiter, to complete his purchase of the island. To Falcone, this seems a small matter, a domestic murder of little more than intellectual interest. But as the summer heat takes hold, and the Romans’ investigations begin to grate with a local force more interested in tidy solutions than awkward questions, the island’s spell begins to cast a wider net.

Art, love and music in Venice, ancient and modern

In an ancient burial ground on an island off Venice, a young woman’s casket is pried open, an object is wrenched from her hands, and an extraordinary adventure begins. Crossing centuries, encompassing music, passion and murder, Lucifer’s Shadow gained the ‘highest possible recommendation’ from Bookreporter.com and was hailed as ‘one of the best of 2004′ by Deadly Pleasures.

From the moment he arrives in Venice, Daniel Forster is seduced by the city’s mystery. An earnest young academic, Daniel has come for a summer job cataloguing a private collector’s library.

But when Daniel’s employer sends him to buy a stolen violin from a petty thief, a chain reaction of violence and deception ignites. Suddenly Daniel is drawn into a police investigation-and a tempest swirling around a beautiful woman, a mysterious palazzo, and a lost musical masterpiece dating back centuries.

With each step he takes, Daniel unwittingly retraces a journey that began in 1733, when another young man came to Venice. And when, in this realm of intrigue and beauty, two lovers came face-to-face with a killer-and a mystery was born.

Separated by centuries, two tales of passion, betrayal, and danger collide. Sweeping the reader from the intrigue of Vivaldi’s Venice to the gritty world of a modern cop, from the genius of a prodigy to the greed of a killer, Lucifer’s Shadow builds to a shattering crescendo-and one last, breathtaking surprise.

Richly enjoyable, sophisticated and beguiling entertainment. Sunday Times

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 Times

This intelligent and highly detailed thriller by British author Hewson (A Season for the Dead, 2003) rivals Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel (1994) in historical intricacy, complexity of motive, and multileveled storytelling. Booklist

The true story of a fight for rural England

I thought my journalism days were behind me. But sometimes life has a habit of turning things around in ways you least expect. In December 2005 I was in Rome researching what was to become the sixth Nic Costa novel, which will appear in 2008. Out of the blue I took a phone call from his wife which revealed that the large London university Imperial College had very big designs on the area where I was lucky enough to live.

The next ten months saw an extraordinary battle by ordinary people pitched against an army of well-paid professional developers trying to turn some of the most beautiful - and protected - countryside in England over to the bulldozer. They were just ordinary citizens appalled by what was being planned, in secret and with the covert support of our own public representatives. The most extraordinary part of all is… we won. After concerted local opposition and a string of revelations on save-wye.org , the web-site I set up as a public forum to discuss Imperial’s plans, the project collapsed.

You can read this amazing saga in full on the save-wye web-site, with all the original articles there as they appeared. But this story deserves more, not least because there are many other people out there who are desperate to know how Wye won where so many others failed. The answer is through luck, determination and some very single-minded people. So in some ways this isn’t a story that far from fiction at all… though every last word is true, even though I occasionally had to pinch himself when reminded of that fact.

SAVED is a full length account of the true story of this campaign from its opening to close. It’s not hagiography or triumphalist, because this may be a short-lived victory. Nor does it seek to hide the mistakes that were made along the way, because one important thing we learned during this fight was that honest and openness were often the most powerful weapons the Wye campaigners had - and sometimes the only ones.

I’m grateful to everyone who helped with the Wye campaign, in particular my colleague in the site, Justin Williams, without whom this story would not have had such a satisfactory ending.