DAS VERBRECHEN - HEWSON DAVID - DTV

A FAMILY IN TURMOIL. A COUNTRY IN CRISIS. ALL DEBTS MUST BE SETTLED

A page-turning adaptation of the first season of the original Danish television series The Killing, from the author of the Detective Nic Costa series

Through the dark wood where the dead trees give no shelter Nanna Birk Larsen runs . . . There is a bright monocular eye that follows, like a hunter after a wounded deer. It moves in a slow approaching zigzag, marching through the Pineseskoven wasteland, through the Pentecost Forest. The chill water, the fear, his presence not so far away . . . There is one torchlight on her now, the single blazing eye. And it is here.

Sarah Lund is looking forward to her last day as a detective with the Copenhagen Police department before moving to Sweden. But everything changes when 19-year-old student Nanna Birk Larsen is found raped and brutally murdered in the woods outside the city. Lund's plans to relocate are put on hold as she leads the investigation along with fellow detective Jan Meyer. While Nanna's family struggles to cope with their loss, local politician Troels Hartmann is in the middle of an election campaign to become the new mayor of Copenhagen. When links between City Hall and the murder suddenly come to light, the case takes an entirely different turn. Over the course of 20 days, suspect upon suspect emerges as violence and political intrigue cast their shadows over the hunt for the killer.

Originally written for the stage, “The Weapon” is about the limitations of torture and demonstrates why Jeff is considered a master of both the modern thriller and the short story.Tragic events unfold in a snowy, sleepy Colorado town. From the first scene of Remaking, in which a man sits alone in the cold, watching a father and son in a diner, you know something is about to go horribly wrong. The lead characters of Iced bear a shocking resemblance to people we might know—even to ourselves—pillars of society crumbling in an avalanche of bad decisions that seemed perfectly rational at the time.In “Justice Served,” Mariah Stewart shows what might happen when a young woman does what the rest of us only think about in our darkest moments. It is a tale of vengeance that takes you to corners of the human heart better left unexplored in real life.“The Circle” is a perfectly symmetrical tale that shatters our comfortable isolation from current events. Through the eyes of a young pregnant woman we see the world from a new perspective as a train carries her from a state of innocence into a state of fear.“Roomful of Witnesses” clearly demonstrates that the strangest fiction always contains a kernel of truth. Based on a real place, this twisted tale could only have been written by R. L. Stine and reveals his wonderfully off-kilter look at the world.

Sarah Lund, vicecommissario della Omicidi di Copenaghen, è pronta. Sta per trasferirsi con il figlio Mark e il fidanzato Bengt in Svezia, per iniziare una nuova vita. L'aspetta però ancora un giorno di lavoro, giusto il tempo di sistemare le ultime cose ed effettuare il passaggio di consegne al suo successore, Jan Meyer. Sarah non immagina però che sta per capitarle un caso che la coinvolgerà al punto da stravolgere completamente i suoi programmi: il brutale assassinio di una diciannovenne, Nanna Birk Larsen, il cui corpo viene rinvenuto nel bagagliaio di una macchina, sprofondata nelle acque di un canale in un bosco fuori città. Il movente dell'omicidio è un mistero, e la situazione si complica ancora di più quando emerge un collegamento fra la morte della ragazza e Troels Hartmann, brillante politico impegnato in una campagna senza esclusione di colpi per le imminenti elezioni a sindaco della capitale. Mentre il capo della polizia li sprona a chiudere il caso che rischia di travolgere il candidato sindaco, Lund e Meyer portano tenacemente avanti l'indagine scoprendo verità inquietanti e destreggiandosi fra il passato della vittima e della sua famiglia e l'ambiguo mondo della politica. E la strada che porta all'assassino, in un susseguirsi frenetico di ipotesi e di presunti colpevoli, si rivela un labirinto dal quale è difficile uscire.

A novelized adaptation of Shakespeare's play follows Macbeth and his wife as they develop a plan to keep Scotland united but find themselves entangled in a web of murder and treachery.

A pageturning adaptation of the first season of the original Danish television series The Killing, from the author of the Nic Costa series

Through the dark wood where the dead trees give no shelter Nanna Birk Larsen runs . . . There is a bright monocular eye that follows, like a hunter after a wounded deer. It moves in a slow approaching zigzag, marching through the Pineseskoven wasteland, through the Pentecost Forest. The chill water, the fear, his presence not so far away . . . There is one torchlight on her now, the single blazing eye. And it is here.

Sarah Lund is looking forward to her last day as a detective with the Copenhagen Police department before moving to Sweden. But everything changes when 19-year-old student Nanna Birk Larsen is found raped and brutally murdered in the woods outside the city. Lund's plans to relocate are put on hold as she leads the investigation along with fellow detective Jan Meyer. While Nanna's family struggles to cope with their loss, local politician Troels Hartmann is in the middle of an election campaign to become the new mayor of Copenhagen. When links between City Hall and the murder suddenly come to light, the case takes an entirely different turn. Over the course of 20 days, suspect upon suspect emerges as violence and political intrigue cast their shadows over the hunt for the killer.

Roma. Durante un'estate torrida un bambino di sette anni, Alessio Bramante, figlio di un celebre professore di archeologia, scompare misteriosamente nelle catacombe che tagliano le viscere della città. L'uomo indagato per il supposto omicidio del bambino viene inspiegabilmente lasciato alla mercé della furia del padre di Alessio, che lo uccide senza esitazione: il solo ad andare in carcere, per un amaro scherzo del destino, sarà dunque Giorgio Bramante. Quattordici anni dopo qualcuno aggredisce Leo Falcone, collega dell'ispettore Nic Costa, che all'epoca aveva lavorato al caso senza riuscire a risolverlo. Bramante, nel frattempo, viene rilasciato, mentre in prossimità di Castel Sant'Angelo, all'interno di un museo dedicato alle anime del Purgatorio, viene rinvenuta una maglietta appartenuta al piccolo Alessio. Sulla stoffa, incredibilmente, vi sono tracce fresche di sangue. Ben presto, Costa e i suoi collaboratori si trovano a dover risolvere un atroce mistero legato all'antico culto di Mitra, e a una vendetta che sembra non essersi ancora pienamente consumata...

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.

On a warm, golden evening in Rome, celebrities and paparazzi gather at the Villa Borghese as a legendary director premieres his long-anticipated film version of Dante's Inferno. But minutes later the scene is chaos: A man lies dead, the film's star is missing, and a priceless relic has vanished.
 
As the premiere shifts locations—from Rome to San Francisco—detective Nic Costa finds himself on U.S. shores for the first time, charged with protecting a trove of rare Italian artworks and artifacts, as well as an American film actress, Maggie Flavier. When a killer indeed strikes, and with Flavier in danger, Costa races to unravel the chilling clues that connect Dante's nine circles of Hell to the shattering revelations of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. But he may be too late. For a cunning plot is closing in around Costa, guided by a poet's ancient vision of sin and punishment and a killer's genius for terror.
 
Previously published as Dante's Numbers.

On a cold, moonlit night in January 1944, Anne-Marie Walters, just 20 years old, parachuted into southwest France to work with the Resistance in preparation for the long-awaited Allied invasion. The daughter of a British father and a French mother, she was to act as a courier for George Starr, head of the Wheel WRIGHT circuit of SOE. Over the next seven months Anne-Marie criss-crossed the region, carrying messages, delivering explosive arranging the escape of downed airmen and receiving parachute drops of arms and personnel at dead of night---living in constant fear of capture and torture by the Gestapo. Then, on the very eve of Liberation, she was sent off on foot over the Pyrenees to Spain, carrying urgent despatches for London.

Aine-Marie Walters wrote Moondrop to Gascony immediately after the war, while the events were still vivid in her mind. It is a tale of high adventure, comradeship and kindness, of betrayals and appalling atrocities, and of the often unremarked courage of many ordinary French men and women who risked their lives to help drive German armies from French soil. And through it all shines Anne-Marie's quiet courage, a keen sense humour and, above all, her pure zest for life.

For this new edition, David Hewson, a former Regular Army Officer and much-interested in military hitory adds biographical details for the main characters, identities the real people behind the pseudonyms and provides background notes. He also reveals what happened to Anne-Marie afiter the war.

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….

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.

On an August night on a small island near Venice, a fire explodes in a glassmaking shop. When help arrives, two people are dead, a rich Englishman is implicated, and investigators from Rome are assigned a case no one wants them to solve....In this spellbinding new novel featuring Detective Nic Costa, author David Hewson weaves together the rich fabric of Europe's most beguiling city with a riveting tale of passion, corruption, and the poisonous bite of betrayal.

On their private island, the Arcangelo family defy the world: living in a decaying palazzo, making glass in a terrifying, archaic furnace, watching their absurd exhibition hall sink into disrepair. But now the world is coming to their dying outpost in a crumbling corner of a Venice that tourists never see. Police boats and vaporetti bring investigators, curiosity seekers, and one man who plans to own the property himself. With two family members consumed by the foundry fire, both mystery and opportunity have been bared to the bone.

On special assignment from Rome, Detective Nic Costa, along with his partner, his boss, and a dogged pathologist named Teresa Lupo, is getting in the way of progress, Venetian-style. They know that Uriel Arcangelo and his wife were murdered. They know that a predatory Englishman must be a suspect, as is the family of the murdered woman. And while everyone wants the Roman cops to give up and go home, they can't–because a matter of desire, death, and lies has just turned murderously on one of them....

A tale as bewitching as its lush backdrop, The Lizard's Bite is an astounding alchemy of superb writing, vibrant atmosphere, and sheer, gripping suspense.


From the Hardcover edition.

Mentre Sara Farnese è immersa nello studio di antichi testi nella silenziosa Biblioteca Vaticana, in una chiesa vicina si sta consumando un macabro omicidio. Pochi istanti dopo, fa irruzione nella sala lettura l'ex fidanzato di Sara che porta con sé una borsa insanguinata. Si avvicina al tavolo al quale è seduta la donna: ha qualcosa che vorrebbe mostrarle, ma pochi istanti dal suo ingresso nella sala viene freddato da una guardia svizzera a colpi di pistola. In breve la studiosa si ritrova legata a una serie di terrificanti delitti, commessi da uno scaltro assassino.

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 a thriller of astounding menace and power, the acclaimed author of A Season for the Dead returns to the landscape he has made his own—the seething landscape of modern-day Rome–where ancient crimes lie hidden beneath colorful, bustling avenues. Here a teenage girl has disappeared, a detective is exploring a 2000-year-old ritual–and an astonishing mystery is about to unravel in a city of secrets and rage….

In Rome's crowded Campo dei Fiori, a woman rushes up to two carabinieri lounging in their sunglasses and uniforms, insisting that her sixteen-year-old daughter has just been abducted. Detective Nic Costa sees the scene unfold and intervenes. Because Costa knows what the two officers don't: that in the morgue at Rome's police headquarters, a forensic pathologist is examining the strange, mummified corpse of another
girl, whose disappearance and death bear haunting similarities….

Police pathologist Teresa Lupo is Nic's colleague, friend, and his only equal when it comes to breaking the rules to get results, whatever the cost. Now, after years of living with the dead, Teresa insists that her superiors move quickly to save a life. Poring over the body of the girl in the morgue, she has found too many similarities between the girls, including a unique, leering tattoo. Lupo is sure that the vanished girl is headed for a bizarre ancient Bacchanalia involving virgins and sacrificial murder–a ritual that is only days away.

As Nic and Teresa claw at the case from two sides–and as Nic finds himself at once puzzled and beguiled by the missing girl's seductive mother–a chilling picture is beginning to emerge…of secret relationships and sexual depravity, organized crime and unimaginable corruption. With the clock ticking down on a young girl's life, Nic and Teresa are about to make the most horrifying discovery of all—in a pit of human darkness, where an age-old malevolence still endures, evil has consumed innocence…and a very modern vengeance has begun.

A spellbinding mix of suspense, forensic science, and human drama, The Villa of Mysteries will catch you off guard at every turn—a novel that is at once heartbreaking and impossible to put down.

In an ancient burial ground on an island off Venice, a young woman's casket is pried open, an object is wrenched from her hands, and an extraordinary adventure begins.

From the moment he arrives in Venice, Daniel Forster is seduced by the city's mystery and eroticism. An earnest young academic, Daniel has come for a summer job cataloguing a private collector's library. But when Daniel's employer sends him to buy a stolen violin from a petty thief, a chain reaction of violence and deception ignites. Suddenly Daniel is drawn into a police investigation—and a tempest swirling around a beautiful woman, a mysterious palazzo, and a lost musical masterpiece dating back centuries. With each step he takes, Daniel unwittingly retraces a journey that began in 1733, when another young man came to Venice. And when, in this realm of intrigue and beauty, two lovers came face-to-face with a killer—and a mystery was born. Separated by centuries, two tales of passion, betrayal, and danger collide in David Hewson's dazzling novel. Sweeping us from the intrigue of Vivaldi's Venice to the gritty world of a modern cop, from the genius of a prodigy to the greed of a killer, Lucifer's Shadow builds to a shattering crescendo—and one last, breathtaking surprise.


From the Hardcover edition.

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….