This is a Rome set conspiracy thriller from David Hewson, a rather gruesome one with a serial killer running rampant in the city. A beautiful Professor of Early Christianity, Sara Farnese, is in the Vatican Library, when a distraught colleague of hers enters, Stefano Rinaldo, armed with a gun and the skin of a man recently flayed is shot dead by a security guard. A young 27 year old police officer, Nic Costa, is first on the scene, and despite the Vatican being out of his jurisdiction, he gets drawn into the investigation. Based on what Stefano had whispered to her, Sara drags Nic to a church where the bodies of the flayed man and Rinaldo's wife are discovered, with graffiti proclaiming that the blood of the martyrs is the seeds of the church. Nic and his older cop partner, the jaded Luca Rossi, explain the grisly crimes motivated by jealousy, with Stefano, a previous lover of Sara's, killing her current lover. However, this is the first of a series of horrifying murders emulating the deaths of Christian martyrs.

The case reveals a connection to the disgraced Boston born Cardinal Michael Denney, now a virtual prisoner in the Vatican, responsible for the downfall of the Banca Lombardia, a man with powerful enemies, many from the criminal underbelly, who lost vast amounts of money and now seeking vengeance. If Denney steps outside the Vatican City, the police are waiting to arrest him, but the Catholic Church are not happy to be harbouring him, seeking a political solution as all his influence drains away. Inspector Falcone of the Rome State Police gives the art loving Nic, obsessed with the paintings of Caravaggio, a major role in the investigation, despite his obvious inexperience, and to the dismay of his partner, Luca, worried about anomalies in the case. All the victims have personal and intimate connections with Sara, it's Nic's task to get close to the dispassionate and enigmatic Sara, a Sara that appears to be the key to the entire case, but she is determined to keep her secrets.

Hewson writes a intricately plotted thriller with plenty of suspense and tension, set in the beautiful city of Rome, immersed in Italian culture and art, amidst the intrigue and corruption associated with the Vatican. There is an entertaining and engaging read, it easily held my interest with twist after twist. My only concern was the character of Nic, with his beloved famous communist father in the process of dying, and finding himself attracted to Sara. Nic was not a man I wholly believed in, but this did not diminish my enjoyment of this novel. Many thanks to Black Thorn for an ARC. crime-fiction mystery netgalley ...more62 s Rob511 136

Book 1 in the Nic Costa series published 2003.

What a strange and complex work this is.
Strange it might be but strange for all the right reasons.
Rome is the setting.
On one level itÂ’s a dark murder mystery that only gets darker the further into the book you go. There are a few OMG jaw dropping moments but there was one particular moment that was so OMG, jaw dropping that it made my eye look organ stops and that doesnÂ’t happen to me very often.
Then there were the instructive components.
We find out who the psychopath is fairly early on in the book but why he is doing what he is doing takes a bit longer.
HeÂ’s a man on a mission, bringing sinners to the lord. But to do the job properly his victims have to endure what the early martyrs endured and these martyrs met some pretty gruesome ends. So along the way we get a pretty good introduction into the lives of some of these early Christian Martyrs and the churches dedicated to them.
Then we have Nic Costa a young detective working with the Rome police who is one of the team working the case. Nic has an obsession, Caravaggio, almost to the point of being anal. To Nic ‘Caravaggio’ spoke the truth in the 16 hundreds and if you but take a good look at his paintings you will find the same truths still hold true to-day.
I was so entranced by NicÂ’s rumination on Caravaggio that I found myself researching his life and works for hours.

So, for me, the book succeeded on three different levels.
1. It was a great murder mystery.
2. I learned a lot about Christian Martyrdom.
3. Caravaggio has gone from, for me, an obscure artist that I knew next to nothing about to an artist of major significance.

Highly recommended 4 stars
2020-reads mystery23 s John McDermott405 73

My second Nic Costa book and while not as good as The Lizards Bite ,A Season for the Dead was certainly gripping and very enjoyable. Satisfyingly gruesome and full of great Roman atmosphere set during a heatwave ; you can literally feel the heat coming off the page.
This is a series I'll definitely be continuing with and should serve as some compensation for the loss of the late, great Michael Dibden and his brilliant Aurelio Zen novels.
3.75
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