Every month we'll try to give you a new book of merit whose author may be new to most of you.
Hewson, David Dante's Numbers
The long-lived Nic Costa Series (A Season for the Dead, 2004), accustomed to the piazzas, by-ways, taverns and coffee-bars of Rome (Italy, not New York) moves this time to the hills and alleys of San Francisco. When a movie premiere in Rome is disrupted by the gruesome murder of its lead, the event is moved to SF, the home city of aging, dying legendary director Roberto Tonti. More murders ensue. It appears as if someone is programming the murders to Dante's circles; but, then, in San Fran, events appear to parallel those in Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo, famously filmed there, and worked on by a young Tonti many years before. The plot is labyrinthine, as is Rome, as is SF, and takes more twists than Lombard Street, right up to another one when you begin to think all is settled. There's plenty to think about here, for the reader as well as for Nic who, still grieving (cf. the previous book in the series), tries to puzzle out the movies and the reality. If nothing else, this will make you want to (well, maybe not read all of Dante) re-view Vertigo or see it for the first time if you never have, and maybe look into an odd largely unknown fiction by Robert Louis Stevenson called The Wrong Box. Then the ending comes crashing at you in the last two pages, calling all futures for Nic into doubt--his own personally, as a police officer, and his new relationship with the actress Maggie Flavier. Stay tuned.........
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