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| Just could not get into this book. May be that it takes place in Rome and there is too much about the Vatican. Not sure. |
It’s a scorching summer in Rome. Sara Farnese sits in the Vatican Library. The streets are deserted. A man walks toward her. He is familiar. He is carrying a blood-stained bag…
Stefano’s left arm, the one holding the weapon, swept the table, swept everything on it, the precious volume of Apicius, her expensive notebook computer, down to the hard marble floor with a clatter.
He said in a loud voice that was half crazy, half dead, ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.’ As the media gathers and Vatican officials close ranks, a young detective is sent to the forefront of the case. Nic Costa is the son of an infamous Italian Communist, a connoisseur of Caravaggio, and a cop who barely looks his 27 years of age.
Thrust into the heart of a killing spree that will rattle his city down to its ancient bones, Nic begins to see a pattern in the killings that follow, murders that seem to mimic the grisly martyrdoms of the early Church.
Racked by personal anxiety over his dying father, Costa starts on the long journey to uncover the truth about these horrific crimes, whatever the cost, whatever the pain. From the inner quarters of the Vatican, desperate to hide a financial embarrassment, to the poorer, squalid bed-sits where the city’s immigrants try to eke out a living, Costa takes on any who crosses his path, however influential, however damaging the cost to his career.
Shunned as the son of a Communist, treated with suspicion by many of those around him, Costa relies on his own intelligence and integrity to find a way into the life of the mysterious Sara Farnese, and unlock the key to the case. But it’s a journey that comes with a terrible risk, and a cost he can never foresee.
David Hewson was born in Yorkshire in 1953 and left school at the age of 17 to work as a cub reporter on one of the smallest evening newspapers in the country in Scarborough.
Later he was a staff reporter on The Times in London, covering news, business and latterly working as arts correspondent. He worked on the launch of the Independent and was a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times for a decade before giving up journalism entirely in 2005 to focus on writing fiction.
