A noble family, a legendary painting, a cursed palazzo. The new Venetian mystery from master storyteller David Hewson.When Arnold Clover is recruited by Lizzie Hawker to help her look into her family inheritance, he cannot begin to guess the journey he is about to embark on. Lizzie's mother, an Italian countess, disappeared thirty years ago, presumed dead. Her father, a famous, some say infamous, music promoter, has just died and now the family home Ca' Scacchi, a leaning palazzo in Dorsoduro, has fallen to her. When her mother vanished so too did a priceless painting, supposedly an erotic portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, which has captivated men for generations.When a body is discovered in a hidden crypt beneath the checkerboard courtyard of the palazzo, other secrets are unearthed with it. Lying with the body is a document, a story of an episode in Casanova's colourful life, and within it a set of clues that might lead to the location of the...

From the author of The Killing, a stunning new standalone thriller set in the far reaches of the Venetian Lagoon... Author Tom Honeyman has locked himself away on a tiny, remote island in the Venetian lagoon in the hope of finding the inspiration to save his career. Instead, he has an unwanted intruder, and a threatening deadline. Tom made his money naming the killer in a vicious murder in his home town Prosper in upstate New York. But the individual who's infiltrated himself onto Tom's island says he fingered the wrong man. Without access to the outside world, no phone, no internet, no means of escape, Tom must write a new book naming the real villain... or lose his life.

The first in a brand-new mystery series from the acclaimed author of The Killing and Devil's Fjord.'Serious history buffs are in for a treat' –Kirkus ReviewsVenice is a city full of secrets. For hundreds of years it has been the scene of scandal, intrigue and murderous rivalries. And it remains so today.1548, Lorenzino de Medici, himself a murderer and a man few will miss, is assassinated by two hired killers.Today, Marmaduke Godolphin, British TV historian and a man even fewer will miss, is stabbed by a stiletto blade on the exact same spot, his body dropping into the canal.Can the story of the first murder explain the attack on Godolphin? The Carabinieri certainly think so. They recruit retired archivist Arnold Clover to unpick the mystery and to help solve the case. But the conspiracy against Godolphin runs deeper than anyone imagined.

New District Sheriff Tristan Haraldsen uncovers a series of dark secrets when he investigates the disappearance of two boys in the remote Faroe Islands. Newly-appointed District Sheriff Tristan Haraldsen and his wife Elsebeth are looking forward to a peaceful semi-retirement in the remote fishing village of Djevulsfjord on the stunningly beautiful island of Vagar. But when two boys go missing during the first whale hunt of the season, the repercussions strike at the heart of the isolated coastal community. As he pursues his investigations, Tristan discovers that the Mikkelsen brothers aren't the first young men to have vanished on Vagar. Determined to solve the mystery of Djevulsfjord, yet encountering suspicion wherever he turns, Haraldsen comes to realize he and his wife are not living in the rural paradise they had imagined, and that the wild beauty of the region hides a far darker reality.

At his beloved Nonno Paolo's deathbed, fifteen-year-old Nico receives a gift that will change his life forever: a yellowing manuscript which tells the haunting, twisty tale of what really happened to his grandfather in Nazi-occupied Venice in 1943. The Palazzo Colombina is home to the Uccello family: three generations of men, trapped together in the dusty palace on Venice's Grand Canal. Awkward fifteen-year-old Nico. His distant, business-focused father. And his beloved grandfather, Paolo. Paolo is dying. But before he passes, he has secrets he's waited his whole life to share. When a Jewish classmate is attacked by bullies, Nico just watches - earning him a week's suspension and a typed, yellowing manuscript from his frail Nonno Paolo. A history lesson, his grandfather says. A secret he must keep from his father. A tale of blood and madness . . . Nico is transported back to the Venice of 1943, an occupied city seething under its Nazi overlords, and to the defining...

THE FIRST IN THE ACCLAIMED NIC COSTA SERIES 'No author has ever brought Rome so alive for me — nor made it seem so sinister' Peter James 'David Hewson's Rome is dark and tantalizing, seductive and dangerous, a place where present-day crimes ring with the echoes of history' Tess Gerritsen 'Hewson keeps the reader guessing . . . relentlessly tightening the suspense until the end' Daily Telegraph There's no rest for the wicked . . . While Rome is sweltering in the height of summer, a serial killer is on the loose. Sara Farnese is working in the Vatican library, when a man bursts in intent on showing her the contents of his bloodied bag, until a guard shoots him. But why was the man targeting Sara? Determined to find answers, Sara's path crosses with the young, up-and-coming Roman detective, Nic Costa. He's determined to track down the dangerous killer behind this bizarre and brutal murder and to protect Sara from becoming the next victim. . .

It is Holy Week in Seville and the heat is rising. A murderer is on the loose and visiting academic Maria Gutierrez can see something in his ways that the police are missing. But her insight does nothing to help her popularity in the force – and draws her to the attention of the killer. The Angel Brothers, two controversial modern artists, are found dead in a killing that emulates a famous painting, and an old lady remembers the atrocities of the Civil War. Maria was supposed to be an observer to the police investigation. But her own past in the city soon puts her one step ahead of the cops . . . and in the killer's sights. First published as Semana Santa in 1996 by HarperCollins.

As the millennium approaches, the climate on Earth is getting progressively hotter, a phenomenon which makes scientists and others extremely nervous. Unease quickly turns to panic when Air Force One is successfully downed, key communications networks are disrupted, and the world's financial institutions are pushed to the brink of collapse. CIA science chief Helen Wagner and Michael Lieberman, a brilliant designer of a giant space-based solar array, must contend with techno-savvy activists who plan to use the array to cut modern society off at the knees… and start civilization over from scratch.

A Detective Vos thriller by the bestselling author of The Killing."Literary gold" Daily TelegraphAnnie Schrijver is just twenty-two years old. She works in the picturesque Albert Cuyp flower market where her father has a stall. Brimming with personality, she's always been popular with the customers. But then she goes missing, only to be found barely alive, tied to a stone angel in agraveyard, surrounded by a ring of fire. Her body contains traces of a drug which connect the police to a previous case: the Sleeping Beauty murders. But Annie seems to have been the lucky one, as a body is found nearby, freshly tattooed with three words: Sleep Baby Sleep.It is summer and Amsterdam is full of tourists drunk or high on all that it has to offer. The drum of music from a make-shift DJ booth near the zoo is deafening, and empty frites cones and beer cans litter the streets. But the atmosphere has sinister undercurrents as a...

A pageturning adaptation of the first season of the original Danish television series The Killing, from the author of the Nic Costa series Through the dark wood where the dead trees give no shelter Nanna Birk Larsen runs… There is a bright monocular eye that follows, like a hunter after a wounded deer. It moves in a slow approaching zigzag, marching through the Pineseskoven wasteland, through the Pentecost Forest. The chill water, the fear, his presence not so far away… There is one torchlight on her now, the single blazing eye. And it is here… Sarah Lund is looking forward to her last day as a detective with the Copenhagen Police department before moving to Sweden. But everything changes when nineteen-year-old student, Nanna Birk Larsen, is found raped and brutally murdered in the woods outside the city. Lund’s plans to relocate are put on hold as she leads the investigation along with fellow detective Jan Meyer. While Nanna’s family struggles to cope with their loss, local politician, Troels Hartmann, is in the middle of an election campaign to become the new mayor of Copenhagen. When links between City Hall and the murder suddenly come to light, the case takes an entirely different turn. Over the course of twenty days, suspect upon suspect emerges as violence, political intrigue cast their shadows over the hunt for the killer.

Detective Nic Costa finds himself a stranger in a strange land when he's sent to infiltrate the mob in a remote part of southern Italy. Roman police detective Nic Costa has been sent undercover to Italy's beautiful, remote Calabrian coast to bring in the head of the feared mob, the 'Ndrangheta, who has offered to turn state witness for reasons of his own.Hoping to reel in the biggest prize the state police have seen in years, the infamous Butcher of Palermo, Costa and his team are aware the stakes are high. But the constant deception is taking its toll. Out of their depth in a lawless part of Italy where they are the outcasts, not the men in the hills, with their shotguns and rough justice, the detectives find themselves pitched as much against one another as the mob. As the tension rises, it's clear the operation is not going to plan. Is Nic Costa getting too close to the enemy for comfort – and is there a traitor among them ...?

From Publishers WeeklyA young Iraqi refugee named Laila provides both the heart and the McGuffin in Hewson's elegant new thriller, the third featuring tough Roman detectives Gianni Peroni and Nic Costa (A Season for the Dead and The Villa of Mysteries). Laila inadvertently witnesses a brutal murder in Rome's Pantheon and earns the guardianship of the top cops. Childless pathologist Teresa Lupo becomes a surrogate mother to the waif as the team slowly closes in on the killer. The position of the naked corpse suggests Leonardo da Vinci's The Vitruvian Man, and carvings on the victim's flesh depict the mystical symbol of the novel's title. The novel seems headed for Dan Brown territory, but Hewson's clever puzzle remains just that, a tantalizing challenge to the detectives and to the encroaching FBI, led by abrasive agents Joel Leapman and Emily Deacon. The perp, it seems, is a serial killer who has similarly carved several victims around the world. Though the novel unfolds via familiar genre conventions—creepy passages from the killer's perspective revealing equal parts of evil and genius, turf skirmishes between our Roman heroes and the FBI suits, imperiled female victims—Hewson's solid writing and multidimensional characters command attention from start to finish of this smart, literate thriller. (Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review This third Nic Costa mystery brings back Roman police detective Costa and his partner, loose-cannon Gianni Peroni, in another case with tentacles reaching back to the Eternal City's ancient history. We begin with a stunning set piece: it's Christmas Eve, and the city is being blanketed by a freakish snowstorm, providing an appropriately eerie landscape for the ritualistic murder of an American woman under the dome in Hadrian's Pantheon. Costa, Peroni, and their boss, Leo Falcone, a bit of a maverick himself, fume as the investigation is snatched away by the FBI. Jockeying between the locals and the ugly Americans sets the acrimonious tone until one of the FBI agents, sympathetic to the Italians, turns out to have a connection to the killer. As he's done in the past (Villa of Mysteries, 2004), Hewson expertly blends historical material into the text. This time the key that unlocks the killer's psyche lies in Roman architecture--specifically, Vitruvius' "sacred cut," the idea that the perfect building uses as its starting point the proportions of the human body. Except our killer is carving his sacred cuts into the backs of his victims. All this historical detail gives the proceedings a tasty complexity comparable to Perez-Reverte, but what really makes the novel work is the interplay between the trio of antiestablishment Roman cops--all no-nonsense guys who find ways around whatever obstacles confront them. A masterful mix of the high-concept historical thriller and the cynical contemporary Italian procedural. Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Publishers WeeklyU.K. novelist and journalist Hewson (Solstice) presents the first in a line of thrillers set in Italy and features detective Nic Costa and an ensemble cast drawn from the ranks of the Rome state police. University professor Sara Farnese is at her desk in the Reading Room of the Vatican Library perusing a 10th-century copy of Apicius's first-century cookbook De Re Coquinaria when former lover and fellow university professor Stefano Rinaldi careens into the room dragging a large plastic bag. Rinaldi dumps the contents of the bagâ€"the freshly flayed skin of an adult maleâ€"and quotes the Christian theologian, Tertullian ("The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church"), then takes a couple of bullets in the head from a panic-stricken Swiss Guard. Detective Costa and partner Luca Rossi are outside the Vatican in St. Peter's Square on pickpocket patrol when they catch the news of the shooting on a police scanner, charge into the Reading Room and are quickly kicked out by security man Brendan Hanrahan for jurisdictional reasons ("The Vatican is another country"). Rossi and Costa become officially involved when the skinless remains of Sara's lover and the body of Rinaldi's wife are found strung up in an ancient Roman church. After this rousing beginning, the intricate plot spins off in several directions, involving corrupt cardinal Michael Denney, the Mafia, Vatican secrecy and the serial killer who's murdering Sara's former lovers in ways that mimic famous paintings depicting the martyrdom of selected saints. 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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review“This enthralling story has it all...Best of all, it’s so seamlessly put together that time flies as you flip pages to get to the end.” —*Rocky Mountain News“Intelligent entertainment. Hewson, far more than most thriller writers, has a serious concern for character.” —Washington Post*"Richly enjoyable, sophisticated and beguiling entertainment."—Sunday Times"Keeps the reader guessing...relentlessly tightening the suspense until the end."—Daily Telegraph"Engrossing... a complex story and an abundance of historical detail."—Publishers Weekly*"An idealistic detective ... Likeable Nic exudes series potential."—Kirkus Reviews*