About this item
Acclaimed author David Hewson returns with this mesmerizing new thriller featuring Nic Costa and the detectives of Rome’s Questura. This time Costa must solve a case with roots buried deep in one of the ancient city’s most infamous episodes—a story of incest, murder, and martyrdom. It’s August in Rome, and Nic Costa’s vacation is about to be cut short by a scream, a girl covered in blood, and a man lying dead in the Via Beatrice Cenci. It seems that Malise Gabriel, a scholar with an impressive list of enemies, stepped onto faulty scaffolding for a cigarette and fell to his death. On the surface, it’s no more than an unfortunate accident. But the deeper Costa looks—into the facts that don’t add up, into the haunted eyes of Gabriel’s beautiful daughter, Mina, and into the mysterious links between the present and the past—the more he’s haunted by disturbing parallels with a centuries-old crime: In 1599, Beatrice Cenci was beheaded by the Vatican for murdering her father, a man known for unthinkable sexual crimes.
About the Author
David Hewson's novels have been translated into a wide range of languages, from Italian to Japanese, and his debut work, Semana Santa, set in Holy Week Spain, was filmed with Mira Sorvino. Dante's Numbers is his thirteenth published novel.David was born in Yorkshire in 1953 and left school at the age of seventeen to work as a cub reporter on one of the smallest evening newspapers in the country in Scarborough. Eight years later he was a staff reporter on The Times in London, covering news, business and latterly working as arts correspondent. He worked on the launch of the Independent and was a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times for a decade before giving up journalism entirely in 2005 to focus on writing fiction.Semana Santa won the WH Smith Fresh Talent award for one of the best debut novels of the year in 1996 and was later made into a movie starring Mira Sorvino and Olivier Martinez. Four standalone works followed before A Season for the Dead, the first in a series set in Italy. There are now nine Costa titles published in numerous languages around the world including Chinese and Japanese... and Italian.David followed these books with three acclaimed adaptations of the award-winning Copenhagen TV crime series The Killing. In 2014 he debuted a new series set in Amsterdam with The House of Dolls. With A.J. Hartley he has also authored two popular adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet, originally for audio now out in ebook. In 2018 he won the prized Audie for best original audio work for Romeo and Juliet: A Novel, narrated by Richard Armitage, an Audible exclusive. In 2018 he published a much-anticipated tenth book in the Nic Costa series, The Savage Shore. In 2019 he released Devil's Fjord, a standalone mystery set in the Faroe Islands.2020 sees the release of Shooter in the Shadows, a standalone thriller set on a remote private island in Venice.
