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A Nic Costa Mystery
by David Hewson
Book Reviewed by:The snow is falling in Rome - in the heart of the city, under the Pantheon's great dome, a woman's body lies on the marble floor, carefully positioned with a gruesome carving on her back....this horrific murder hurtles Rome's police force into a collision with U.S. agents–and a secret that has festered for fifteen years, now unraveling in the world's most enigmatic city.
The snow is
falling on the ancient streets of Rome. And in the heart of the city, under the
Pantheon's great dome, a woman's body lies on the marble floor, carefully
positioned with a gruesome carving on her back....In David Hewson's ingenious
new thriller, this horrific murder hurtles Rome's police force into a collision
with U.S. agents–and a secret that has festered for fifteen years, now
unraveling in the world's most enigmatic city.
When Detective Nic Costa arrives at the scene, he is unprepared for what he
finds, or for the ambush that leaves his only witness vanished into the night.
The dead woman was American. Within hours, U.S. agents descend with a
take-no-prisoners style and a shocking story to tell: the killer has struck
before, in monuments all over the world, leaving the same cryptic message carved
onto the bodies of the victims.
But one agent, beautiful, blond Emily Deacon, has yet another story to tell Nic–about
a stunning act of deception that may lead back to the U.S. government, and her
own chilling, personal connection to the killer. Now, as the first murder leads
to more grisly slayings and a motley crew of veteran Roman cops jousts with the
Americans, Nic is pulled into a woman's harrowing search for the truth…a search
that will take them both into the mind of a madman, into a shocking
conspiracy–and into a dark episode in a nation's long-forgotten past.
From its haunting opening to its nerve-shattering climax, The Sacred Cut
defies all our expectations, proving once again the unique and compelling genius
of David Hewson.
Nic Costa is a protagonist for the modern
day - just like Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti, Costa is a thoughtful man of many facets who struggles to do the right thing.
Described by some as a Roman Inspector Morse, the series is gaining quite
a reputation in Hewson's native England, and is overdue to breakout in the USA.
Hewson feels that most crime fiction falls into two categories,
'bloodless-crime' where murder is a catalyst to an intellectual puzzle; and
'tough guy crime', which assumes that the world is neatly divided between good
and and bad. Neither appeal to him because neither
represent the world we live in. Hewson's characters inhabit a real world
where virtually every issue is measured, not in black and
white, but in shades of gray, and the issue in question is how to respond to
these challenges as an individual.
I don't usually expect a detective mystery to reshape how I think about things
but just one throw-away comment from Costa in the opening pages has caused me to
question that old adage 'a picture's worth a thousand words'. "You
know the great thing about pictures? They only show what's on the surface. The rest you make up. You write
your own story. You imagine your own beginning and your own ending.
Pictures are fiction pretending to be truth."..continued
Full Review
(534 words)
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
About the Nic Costa series: The Sacred Cut is Hewson's third mystery to
star Roman detective Nic Costa. The series started with A Season for
the Dead, published in the UK in 2003 and in the USA in 2004. Then
followed The Villa of Mysteries (2004/2005) and The Sacred
Cut (2005).
The next in the series, The Lizard's Bite was published in the UK in March and will be available in hardcover in the USA this November. Hewson says the story harks back
to an earlier standalone mystery he wrote - Lucifer's Shadow
(published in the UK in 2001 and in the US in 2005), and includes some of the
same characters. Costa takes on a case that, for the first time, takes him
beyond the known and comfortable confines of Rome, ...
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