All Entries in the "The Seventh Sacrament" Category
The Seventh Sacrament wins top audio prize
Saul Reichlin
The fifth Nic Costa novel, The Seventh Sacrament, has won the new Audible Sounds of Crime prize for the unabridged crime audiobook of the year. The award, which was based on votes from readers, was announced at the Bristol CrimeFest conference at the weekend.
I’m really honoured and flattered to get such a plaudit for the work, and delighted too that I quite rightly share it with Saul Reichlin, right, the series narrator, whose astonishing performance of the books is surely one of the main reasons for their popularity in audio.
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 locations for The Seventh Sacrament
This annotated map shows some of the key locations in The Seventh Sacrament.
The Seventh Sacrament gallery
This is a selection of photographs I took during the research for The Seventh Sacrament. Many of them cover the area of the Aventino hill where much of the book is set.
The hidden city: underground Rome
A wall painting in the Case Romane del Celio, one of the rare underground sites open to the public, in the Clivo Scauri beneath SS Giovanni e Paolo.
Some questions never go away. One I get constantly is, ‘Why did you choose to set your books in Rome?’ The honest answer is I didn’t; Rome chose me, clubbing me over the head one day when I happened to be there editing a book about somewhere else entirely. I’ve now completed seven Costa novels, and still have two more to go under my present contract… and hopefully lots after that.
So am I bored with Rome? You have to be kidding. Rome isn’t a place, it’s an entire universe, a limitless world of possibilities, ancient, medieval and modern. The Romans have a saying about their city: ‘Non basta una vita’. One life isn’t enough. You bet. Take, for example, the background to The Seventh Sacrament, which is a city I never knew existed until I took to the streets and started asking interesting questions of interesting people.
Much of this book takes place in underground Rome. No, not the odd sewer or archaeological excavation. I mean a different, hidden city altogether, a world of temples and streets, shops and simple homes, all going back two thousands years or more, and very familiar indeed to the specialists who spend their time exploring this unseen metropolis.
Ancient Rome was huge, a city of more than a million souls, and its subterranean legacy falls into three distinct types. Over two millennia the Imperial-era city has come to be buried by the rebuilding work of the centuries. Palaces such as Nero’s Domus Aurea - the Golden House - now lie beneath the rubble of ages, in the case of the Domus beneath the hill by the side of the Colosseum, next to the modern subway station. Many churches stand on the actual sites of the homes of Christian martyrs, which are preserved in the foundation.
But two kinds of remains were put beneath the earth to begin with. The first are the ancient sewers and aqueducts built out of pride and civic duty by emperors competing with one another for their legacy. Many are still working today. The Trevi fountain is fed by an Imperial aqueduct. The Cloaca Maxima, the original sewer of pre-Imperial Rome, which runs through the Forum, continues to empty into the Tiber as it did in the days when the bodies of executed criminals were thrown into it for quick disposal.
Walk along the Tiber and you will see many ancient outlets such as this - now used by the city homeless
And there are the temples, which came to form the heart of my story. SACRAMENT centres around Giorgio Bramante, an archaeologist with an obsession for the subterranean, and one element of it in particular: Mithraic temples which were usually built beneath the earth to begin with. Bramante is an expert - as much as one can be - on the cult of Mithras which was wiped out when the empire adopted Christianity as Rome’s sole religion when Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. The literature and rites of Mithraism were largely lost after that time. But we know that the cult was popular among soldiers and civil servants, that it emphasised loyalty to the state and the empire, and that its followed were divided into seven different hierarchical ranks, with promotion depending upon some kind of sacrament, a penance, perhaps an ordeal, which had to be borne in order to gain advancement. Hence the title of my book.
You can read a lot about Mithraism these days - much of it conjecture. But I don’t research books by reading alone. I needed to know what it felt like to be underground, and to talk to people who shared the same kind of interests I intended to visit upon Giorgio Bramante.
The enterprising tourist can find several interesting underground sites open to the public. The catacombs are well known - and pretty boring to me. The Basilica of San Clemente, close to the Colosseum, is altogether more interesting. Pay a small fee and you can descend into its lower levels, passing through an early Christian church, and winding up in the original subterranean Mithraeum. Just around the corner, in the ancient street known today as the Clivo Scauri, there is also a recently-opened excavation beneath the church of SS Giovanni e Paolo which has revealed shops, homes and a wealth of wall paintings.
But Giorgio Bramante would have looked down on these as mere tourist attractions. I needed more… and I soon found the place to get it. Roma Sotterranea is an organisation run by people who have permission to go places the ordinary public can’t. They have an excellent web site. They run tours for the public. They also have a membership system that runs occasional visits to more out of the way sites too, some of which come close to what we in the UK would call pot holing and in the US spelunxing.
I signed up to join in the winter of 2004 and have fond if chilly memories of those months. To be honest, damp, dark underground spaces aren’t my favourite places. But I wanted to try to understand what drove people to investigate them, and, more than anything, to get some feel for what they were really like. I hope that informs the finished book, much of which takes place in the caves, waterways, and hidden temples and streets that run beneath modern Rome, unseen by the millions who tramp the pavement above.
And when I felt I had enough I stopped. I write fiction, not fact. I need a solid basis on which to weave my fantasies. But I am not writing a guide. Some of the places in SACRAMENT - such as the Little Museum of Purgatory and the ossuary of the Via Veneto - are real. Most are not, or are mangled versions of the original. That is what I do for a living: invent from a basis of truth.
It was a great experience. But when I look back on writing the next book I can see I didn’t spent one moment underground. Instead, that title focuses on the world and legacy of Caravaggio, a continuing obsession of my detective Nic Costa, and one I was happy to explore through a year spent largely in galleries, private, public and religious.
Non basta una vita. Dead right…
Reviews of The Seventh Sacrament
Booklist, the Americal Library Association’s influential magazine, says of The Seventh Sacrament…
Hewson’s uncompromising trio of antiestablishment Roman cops—Nic Costa, Gianni Peroni, and their boss, Leo Falcone—are back in the Eternal City and up to their necks in another vat of hot water. As with the previous four entries in this always-captivating series, the crime on the front burner—a dead body discovered in a Roman church—is merely the entrée point to a case with tentacles extending deep into ancient history…Hewson keeps his readers securely tethered to a narrative lifeline; like Theseus on the trail of the minotaur, we follow the plot around countless blind corners but never lose our way out of the maze. The interplay between Hewson’s three cops—and between them and the especially rich supporting cast—lift this novel far above the plot-driven Da Vinci Code and its many imitators. A superb mix of history, mystery, and humanity.
Amazon’s top reviewer Harriet Klausner is among the growing number of critics welcoming the latest Nic Costa novel. She writes…
Costa’s last outing (The Lizard’s Bite) was one of the top police procedurals of 2006; The Seventh Sacrament will prove likewise in 2007. The story line is fast-paced while it smoothly moves back and forth between the present and the past. The investigation is top rate filled with twists and turns while Leo brings a human element with his feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Fans will appreciate David Hewson’s superior Roman adventure.
I Love A Mystery’s Bob Walch declares…
A clever and utterly surprising ending will stun even the most jaded reader. 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!
Publisher’s Weekly says…
The intricate fifth thriller from British author Hewson to feature Roman detective Nic Costa (after 2006’s The Lizard’s Bite) artfully weaves several points-of-view as it shifts between past and present. Fourteen years after seven-year-old Alessio Bramante, the son of an eminent archeology professor, disappeared underneath Rome’s ancient Circus Maximus, someone seeking revenge attacks Costa’s colleague, Insp. Leo Falcone, who worked on the unsolved case of the missing boy. Falcone and Costa start asking questions that should have been asked during the original bungled investigation. The subterranean labyrinths just may hold the answers to a mystery whose poignant resolution few readers will anticipate.
From The Times Literary Supplement…
There are hints of Dan Brown here, but David Hewson handles the material intelligently and plot and characterization remain the novel’s strengths. Bramante, the anti-hero, has some of the hall marks of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter though without the misplaced comedy. He is a monstrous creation with a terrifying sexual appetite matched only by his murderous cruelty. The policemen, from the new commissario down to the old sergeant on the front desk, are lively and well drawn, as are the three main characters, Costa, Peroni and Falcone, and their love interests.
The Calgary Herald says…
Beneath the Vespa-crowded streets of Rome, there are other, much older incarnations of the Eternal City. These older Romes are littered with clues to a mysterious pagan past, clues that can be found in the rubble of middens, roads and religious altars. It is this hidden Rome that fascinates David Hewson. Here, in his fifth book featuring his misfit cops Leo Falcone, Gianni Peroni and Nic Costa, he explores both the secrets that haunt old Rome and the terrible secrets that haunt families. Hewson’s work has been compared to that of Donna Leon and Dan Brown, and it will certainly appeal to fans of both writers. His stories are fresh, original, brightly written and very smart, and his latest book is his best so far. This is definitely among this spring’s must-read crime fictions.
The York Press…
The Seventh Sacrament is Yorkshire-born David Hewson’s fifth mystery set in Italy featuring detectives Nic Costa and Gianna Peroni. Back in Rome after their dramatic adventures in Venice, the detectives set about rebuilding their lives. But the sudden appearance of fresh bloodstains on a T-shirt in a local museum soon has the old team back in action again, and it’s not long before they are embroiled in a mystery involving both the ancient cult of Mithras and a sinister ossuary, The House of Bones. If you’re a fan of Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown you’ll love this.
Reviewing The Evidence …
David Hewson can really evoke an Italian atmosphere well – whether the modern city or the frightening underground city. The twists of the story are cleverly done – even when the situation seems obvious he can produce a strange response that can turn the tale on its head. The climax is absolutely shattering.
The Reading Post says…
Hewson is a talented writer with the gift of creating a good, old-fashioned page-turning thriller. His characters shine with real depth and conviction and the plot is breathtakingly imaginative. A superb read for crime fans who like their mysteries both ancient and modern.
Woman magazine (circulation 536,364, which has made the title a Book Club choice)
A thrilling tale…with the author’s captivating descriptions of long-forgotten passageways and temples, and his skill in creating a sinister undertone keeping you, hooked from the off. A highly dramatic tale for those who like a sprinkling of culture with their crime thriller.
Choice magazine
This gripping novel incorporates modern Rome, mysterious happenings in churches and the Roman cult of Mithras. 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.
The Mystery and Thriller Club (UK) magazine says…
The fifth Nic Costa and Gianna Peroni mystery is a devilishly compelling brew of conspiracy, vengeance and murder. Brilliantly entertaining and deftly written, The Seventh Sacrament is a sophisticated and original thriller that cements David Hewson’s burgeoning reputation as one of crime writing’s most exciting talents.