It was a warm, golden evening in Rome—a night filled with anticipation. A legendary director was premiering his new film version of Dante’s Inferno. From around the world, celebrities gathered at the Villa Borghese as the paparazzi thronged among them. But within moments the event was in chaos. A man was dead. The film’s star was missing—and a priceless relic had vanished. In David Hewson’s masterful new novel of suspense, Detective Nic Costa, numb from the recent death of his wife, finds himself and his fellow detectives drawn into a strange and terrifying limbo—the first of Dante’s nine circles of Hell.

While Dante had Beatrice as his guide, Nic Costa has an enigmatic beauty of his own: a bored American film actress named Maggie Flavier who decides that Costa, and no one else, is suited for the job of protecting her from the danger surrounding the film. As the premiere shifts locations—from Rome to San Francisco—Costa leaves Europe for the first time in his life, and is pulled from his grief and ambivalence by Maggie Flavier and the city by the bay. Fortunately his fellow detectives are under no such spell. Charged with protecting a trove of rare Italian artworks and artifacts, they are also joining the hunt for a killer who has struck twice again, leaving behind a tableau of clues that range from Dante’s deadly cycle of numbers to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Now, with Maggie herself in danger, Nic must throw off the fog of wonder and infatuation he feels in the presence of this beautiful woman in all her guises. But it may already be too late. As evidence points to connections deep within the Italian Mafia, and the Roman policemen do battle with a celluloid culture they cannot quite comprehend, a killer’s chilling plot is closing in around them—guided by a poet’s medieval vision of sin and punishment, planned with a modern genius for revenge…....

In a hushed Vatican Reading Room, the scene is shocking: a crazed professor shot dead after brandishing evidence of a grisly crime. Moments later, two bodies are found in a nearby church, each with a gruesome calling card from their killer.

Detective Nic Costa is one of the first on the scene. A cop who barely looks his twenty-seven years, Nic soon meets a woman who will dominate both his thoughts—and his investigation. A cool, beautiful professor of early Christianity, Sara Farnese was in the Vatican Library on that fateful day, a witness to her colleague’s outburst and grotesque death.

And as more bodies are found, her role becomes even more baffling…because each victim had intimately known Sara, a woman whose history becomes more lurid and unfathomable with each revelation. Until the case takes a sudden, strange turn—and the secrets of a woman, a killer, and a city begin to unravel…with devastating consequences…....

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.


From the Hardcover edition....

In the heat of a Rome summer, a seven-year-old boy vanishes in the dank catacombs beneath the city. Now fourteen years have passed, and in acclaimed author David Hewson’s stunning new crime novel the heart-wrenching case has come back to life as Detective Nic Costa and his fellow investigators search through layers of their city’s history–for a killer leaving a trail of bodies, lust, and revenge.

When young Alessio Bramante vanished, there was plenty of blame to go around. His father, a
charismatic professor of archaeology, inexplicably left Alessio alone near a labyrinth of ancient
tunnels and excavations. Six of the professor’s university students, fueled by booze and bravado, involved the boy in their own bizarre ritual at an altar of the ancient warrior god Mithras. And then there were the police: a commanding officer left Giorgio Bramante alone with the prime
suspect, allowing Alessio’s father to beat the man to death.

After years in prison, Giorgio has been set free and, one by one, those connected to the boy’s
disappearance are dying. As Costa and his fellow detectives scramble to find Giorgio, they are thrust into a darkening web of hidden perversions and secret passions past and present.
Because at the heart of this case–as close and as far away as Rome’s underground treasures–is the unanswered question: what really happened to little Alessio Bramante fourteen years ago–and why was his body never found?


From the Hardcover edition....

When a young Englishman arrives in Venice for a summer job, he finds that the city's glittering facade masks a much darker reality. Cataloguing an old library, he discovers a lost musical masterpiece, and is drawn into a game of deception, with its roots in the political minefield of Vivaldi's Venice. Venice 1733: the young Lorenzo Scacchi has just arrived in the city to work for his uncle at the renowned printing press of Ca' Scacchi. Awed by Venice's splendour, Lorenzo discovers a world of possibilities he has never before dreamed of. But he finds a darker side too. Ordered by his uncle to chaperone a beautiful and gifted violinist who cannot openly reveal her identity, Lorenzo is drawn into a dangerous game of deception, with horrifying consequences. More than 250 years later, a young Englishman, Daniel Forster, comes to Venice for a summer job and is immediately seduced by the city's beauty and exoticism. Cataloguing a library in the Ca' Scacchi, Daniel discovers the manuscript of an anonymous eighteenth-century concerto. Soon he has become involved in an elaborate scam, leading to a vertiginous spiral of criminal conspiracy and erotic pursuit. David Hewson brilliantly interweaves two stories of intrigue and corruption, set centuries apart, and eventually draws them together in a stunning double-twist ending. Complex, beautiful, suspenseful, Lucifer's Shadow is Hewson's most tantalising and rewarding novel yet....

In a deserted artist’s studio in the heart of Rome, detectives stumble upon a scene of shocking brutality: two bodies, freshly killed. Looming over them is a painting that bears all the hallmarks of a Caravaggio: a brilliantly colored canvas depicting a shocking tableau of beauty and depravity. . . .

This grisly discovery sends Detective Nic Costa on a desperate chase through the streets of his city. For Costa, finding the killer who escaped him is intensely personal…Teaming with an art expert, Costa follows clues hidden in the mysterious Caravaggio canvas. As he moves through a maze of history, he begins to make stunning connections to the present case. And each discovery brings him closer and closer to a secret buried in a priceless work of art, a conspiracy dating back four hundred years—and men who will stop at nothing to protect their own private garden of evil…....