A Season for the Dead (Nic Costa)

What a great read, a great adventure and a great primer for someone who wants to visit Rome, or look for Caravaggios, or think about corruption within what passes as religion or criminal justice. Hewson has hooked me, and I can't stop reading everything he writes. As a retired police inspector myself, I appreciated how Hewson inteweaves politics, (police, city hall or the church) and how he makes his investigations team efforts and team failures. Bravo, signore.

A SEASON FOR THE DEAD is the first in a series of Italian crime thrillers set in Rome featuring Nic Costa as the protagonist. Costa, 27, is an atypical detective in the Rome Questura. He's a straight-laced, health conscious vegetarian and son of an infamous Communist party political organizer, who is dying. He has a passion for the works of Caravaggio. Things get off to a fast start with a grotesque double homicide in a Roman church with strong similarities to an historic martyr killing within the early Church. Because the victims had ties to beautiful university professor Sara Farnese, she is put under the protective police custody of young Costa. As the plot unfolds with more similar deaths, there is a frantic search for the heinous serial killer who appears to have ties to the Vatican. The Vatican connection is difficult to investigate because of the turf battles between the Questura and the Vatican authorities. The locations used within Rome are off the tourist track and give the reader a better understanding of the underbelly of this great city. The novel is fast moving and exciting with lots of violence and some sex; and there are some unexpected surprises near the end. It brought back memories of Hewson's first novel SEMANA SANTA. Hewson has created an exceptional array of supporting characters, albeit a few too many were non-Italians. Within the Questura, there is Costa's new partner, Luca Rossi and their hard-nosed boss Leo Falcone. Falcone is disliked by everyone, but is honest and determined. Terese Lupo, the police pathologist, is one very busy lady as the death toll mounts. Within the Vatican, we meet security head Brendan Hanrahan and Cardinal Denney, who has been recently disgraced due to the failure of his corrupt Banca Lombardia. Minor characters include a lesbian parliamentarian from Bologna, an American tourist guide, an overweight TV commentator, a whore from Kosovo, and a patron of the arts with Mafia ties. Assuming David Hewson continues with the Nic Costa character, I welcome him to the ranks of Donna Leon, Michael Dibdin, Andrea Camilleri and others who entertain us with their series of Italian mysteries.

Having recently returned from Rome, I found this book to be a fascinating and a compelling murder mystery set in the Eternal City. The heat literally and figuratively rises as young Nic Costa tracks a serial killer through the streets and churches of Rome. He weaves through the gauntlet of legal blocks from the Vatican and a complex yet attractive crucial witness. David Hewson vividly captures the dark shadows of the dolce vita in Rome. The characters are intelligent yet tragically flawed and create terrific tension and suspense. This book is definitely not a cure for insomnia as I have spent several nights up late voraciously reading towards the end.

I very much enjoyed this book. It will appeal to and be sought out by readers of series crime novels set in vividly depicted locations. Readers of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series, which features another Rome-based cop, Donna Leon's Inspector Brunetti, and Barbara Nadel's Istanbul cop, Inspector Ikmen should enjoy this as well. The identity of the killer is unknown to the reader for about the first half of the book. It is then revealed to the reader, so in that sense there is no last-page denoument. However, there are other mysteries around motivation that propel the mystery forward and keep the reader guessing til (almost) the end!If you are squeamish about fairly graphic depictions of violence you may not be as drawn to this book. I compare it to some of the scenes in, for example, Carol O'Connell's 'Killing Critics', featuring New York cop Mallory. Hewson manages to depict a sense of place very successfully, so Rome assumes an identity as a 'character' alongside the human protagonists. Anyone with an interest in the art of Caravaggio will be equally enthralled, as Nic Costa, the young main character cop, is an afficianado. There is some vivid imagery involving several of the paintings of that 17th century Roman 'badboy'.

David Hewson is already well-known overseas as a writer with the ability to craft extremely intelligent novels that at once viscerally entertain and intellectually challenge. While he is relatively unknown in the United States, the publication of A SEASON FOR THE DEAD will change that status for him, and do so immediately.A SEASON FOR THE DEAD begins in the Reading Room of The Vatican. Sara Farnese is an attractive, enigmatic scholar whose field of study is early Christianity. Her tranquil examination of an ancient document is violently disturbed when a colleague, and former lover, bursts into the library waving a gun, dumps a grisly trophy of a violent crime on her desk, and repeats a puzzling quotation before he is shot dead by Vatican guards. Two bodies are subsequently found in a nearby church. Detective Nic Costa of the Italian police is one of the investigators on the case, a riveting, complex character who is a student of the painter Caravaggio and the son of a famous Italian Communist.Costa is almost immediately drawn to Farnese. The attraction becomes all the more intense when subsequent murders begin to occur throughout Rome, each act replicating the martyrdom of a saint and each victim having an intimate tie to Farnese. Costa becomes infatuated with Farnese in spite of himself, knowing that Farnese is not telling what she knows about the murders and the victims. In order to find the killer, Costa must unravel a pattern of deceit, dishonesty and treachery that leads into the heart of the Vatican itself, a city nation that has its own layers of quiet duplicity.Hewson is one of those writers with a fine eye for background detail, and his ability to detail the machinations of the delicate balance between Rome and Vatican City while describing the churches, thoroughfares and people who have earned Rome the title of "The Eternal City" is quietly breathtaking. Hewson additionally possesses two rare abilities. The first is the ability to take his reader through an increasingly complex plot step by step with a minimum of confusion and puzzlement. One could be totally unfamiliar with the Vatican and the early history of the Roman Catholic Church and still feel comfortable with the progression of A SEASON FOR THE DEAD. Hewson also renders comprehensible the history and the scandal of Banca Lombardia in a few pages, a feat that some writers have been unable to accomplish within an entire book! Hewson's other major ability is his penchant for creating strong secondary characters who do not overwhelm the protagonist(s), but instead assist in moving the story along. The result is a tale that is a dark delight, a story that one is compelled to read at one sitting while simultaneously wishing it will never end.There have been some comparisons between A SEASON FOR THE DEAD and THE DA VINCI CODE. I suppose that some comparison is inevitable, given that A SEASON FOR THE DEAD deals to some extent with the Roman Catholic Church and paintings that are linked