The Fallen Angel

The Fallen Angel

Acclaimed author David Hewson returns with this mesmerizing new thriller featuring Nic Costa and the detectives of Rome’s Questura. This time Costa must solve a case with roots buried deep in one of the ancient city’s most infamous episodes—a story of incest, murder, and martyrdom. It’s August in Rome, and Nic Costa’s vacation is about to be cut short by a scream, a girl covered in blood, and a man lying dead in the Via Beatrice Cenci. It seems that Malise Gabriel, a scholar with an impressive list of enemies, stepped onto faulty scaffolding for a cigarette and fell to his death.  On the surface, it’s no more than an unfortunate accident.  But the deeper Costa looks—into the facts that don’t add up, into the haunted eyes of Gabriel’s beautiful daughter, Mina, and into the mysterious links between the present and the past—the more he’s haunted by disturbing parallels with a centuries-old crime: In 1599, Beatrice Cenci was beheaded by the Vatican for murdering her father, a man known for unthinkable sexual crimes. Does Mina’s obsession with Beatrice intimate her own family’s dark secrets, or is someone using her as a smoke screen for a far deadlier plan? Soon another body is discovered and Nic comes to doubt his own first impressions. Something evil is circling Mina, her angry and silent mother, her runaway brother, and her family’s checkered history in England, the United States, and Italy. And now that something is closing in fast for the kill. In a novel that captures modern Rome in all its complexity, as well as its history of beauty and barbarity, genius and blindness, The Fallen Angel is David Hewson at his best—a twisting and twisted contest between innocence and evil. Praise for The Fallen Angel : "The main story takes time to gain momentum, but once secrets begin to be revealed, there's no stopping them. Readers will have a lot of fun peeling away the book's many layers, right down to the final, closing twist." - Publishers Weekly , starred review "...the writing is superior, and the characters engage." -Kirkus Praise for David Hewson’s City of Fear   “Will seize you and not let go until the last page has been turned.”—Douglas Preston   “Packs more twists and action into its brilliantly plotted pages than half a dozen other thrillers combined.”—Linwood Barclay   “Compelling storytelling and elegant prose . . . [an] intelligent and addictive series.”— Richmond Times-Dispatch   “Well-drawn characters, a brisk pace and . . . unexpected plot twists.”— Publishers Weekly David Hewson is the author of sixteen novels. Formerly a weekly columnist for The Sunday Times, he lives in Kent, England, where he is at work on his next crime novel, The Plague Doctor. 1 It was the last Saturday of August, just past midnight. Nic Costa sat on a low semicircular stone bench midway across the Garibaldi Bridge, listening to the Tiber murmur beneath him like some ancient spirit grumbling about the noise and dirt of the city. To his left in Trastevere ran a steady stream of cars and crowded late-night buses taking people home to the suburbs, workers from the hotels and restaurants, diners and drinkers too tired or impoverished to stay in the city anymore. On the opposite side of the river, where this portion of the road bore the name Lungotevere De' Cenci, the traffic flowed toward the city's center, more quietly at this time of night. Rome was slowly, reluctantly, working its way toward sleep. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself at home in the countryside of the Appian Way, listening to nothing but the distant echo of insomniac owls. Then, from both sides of the river, came the familiar sound of the weekend: loud, slurring voices, English, German, American, some he couldn't name. The many busy bars of Trastevere and the Campo dei Fiori were beginning to disgorge their customers onto the street, and for the next few hours the uniformed police and carabinieri who worked the graveyard shift would find themselves dealing with the aftermath of an alcohol culture that was utterly alien to them. Most Romans didn't much like getting drunk. Excess of this nature was socially unacceptable, an embarrassment, though that night he'd had rather more wine than usual and didn't regret it for a moment. Further along the Tiber he could see a noisy bunch of young men and women stumbling across the ancient pedestrian bridge that joined Trastevere, near the Piazza Trilussa, with the centro storico. Costa wished he had the time and energy to walk there, then further still, until he could see the Castel Sant'Angelo illuminated like some squat stone drum left behind by the forgetful children of giants. Rome seemed magical, a fairy-tale city, on a drowsy evening such as this. And there were so many memories locked in these streets and lanes, the houses and churches and palaces around him. Good and bad, some fresh, some fading into the muted, resigned acceptance he had come to recognize as a sign