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Tritt ein in eine Welt voller Geschichten

Hören und Lesen

David Hewson

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...

Christopher Kay

W. F. Howes Ltd

Nic Costa Series

The Villa of Mysteries

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...
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...

Saul Reichlin

The Lizard's Bite

In the gorgeous grounds of Rome's Villa Borghese park the glitterati of the movie world are gathered for a world premiere. A legendary Italian movie director has come out of retirement to create a blockbuster based on Dante's Inferno. But, as Nic Costa and his colleagues attempt to guard the precious collection of historic artifacts attached to the event, the premiere is disrupted by tragedy and a horrific murder. Is a disgruntled admirer of Dante taking his revenge on the cast of the movie? Or are more mundane motives, the dubious financing of the film through criminal connections, to blame? Before Costa and crew have the chance to find out they are removed from the inquiry and find themselves sidelined by the Carabinieri. But when the movie premiere shifts to California and the iconic surroundings of the Marina in San Francisco, Nic Costa's inspector, Leo Falcone, manages to bring them along to work on the investigation from the sidelines. And as life begins to resemble art, Costa and his friends come to realise that the inspiration behind these crimes may be more recent than the Carabinieri suspect.

Dante's Numbers

Twenty years ago a mysterious group called the Butteri committed a series of bizarre crimes, leaving in their wake several bodies, a cryptic message and a kidnapped child. Now, the leaders of the G8 are descending on Rome for a summit, but when a politician is found ritually murdered detective Nic Costa suspects that the old case was never really solved...