Lucifer’s photo gallery

A confession… these are not my original research pictures from writing Lucifer’s Shadow, but pictures taken on later visits. My first set of pictures for the book were shot on film… and lost when a Venetian photo shop destroyed the negatives.

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

A return to the city in the sea

I went back to Venice to write The Lizard’s Bite six years or so after writing Lucifer’s Shadow. Many of the locations are the same, so you may want to look at the larger picture gallery there. Why did I choose to go back? A few reasons. Firstly, I wanted to see what my characters [...]

Reviews of The Lizard’s Bite

Publishers Weekly, October 2006, starred review
British author Hewson’s wonderfully complex and finely paced fourth crime novel (after 2005’s The Sacred Cut) to feature Roman detective Nic Costa and his unconventional partner, Gianni Peroni, finds the pair exiled to Venice, where they look into the case of glassmaker Uriel Arcangelo, who apparently killed his wife, [...]

A Venetian exile

…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.