Sacred Cut

From Publishers WeeklyA young Iraqi refugee named Laila provides both the heart and the McGuffin in Hewson's elegant new thriller, the third featuring tough Roman detectives Gianni Peroni and Nic Costa (A Season for the Dead and The Villa of Mysteries). Laila inadvertently witnesses a brutal murder in Rome's Pantheon and earns the guardianship of the top cops. Childless pathologist Teresa Lupo becomes a surrogate mother to the waif as the team slowly closes in on the killer. The position of the naked corpse suggests Leonardo da Vinci's The Vitruvian Man, and carvings on the victim's flesh depict the mystical symbol of the novel's title. The novel seems headed for Dan Brown territory, but Hewson's clever puzzle remains just that, a tantalizing challenge to the detectives and to the encroaching FBI, led by abrasive agents Joel Leapman and Emily Deacon. The perp, it seems, is a serial killer who has similarly carved several victims around the world. Though the novel unfolds via familiar genre conventions—creepy passages from the killer's perspective revealing equal parts of evil and genius, turf skirmishes between our Roman heroes and the FBI suits, imperiled female victims—Hewson's solid writing and multidimensional characters command attention from start to finish of this smart, literate thriller. (Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review This third Nic Costa mystery brings back Roman police detective Costa and his partner, loose-cannon Gianni Peroni, in another case with tentacles reaching back to the Eternal City's ancient history. We begin with a stunning set piece: it's Christmas Eve, and the city is being blanketed by a freakish snowstorm, providing an appropriately eerie landscape for the ritualistic murder of an American woman under the dome in Hadrian's Pantheon. Costa, Peroni, and their boss, Leo Falcone, a bit of a maverick himself, fume as the investigation is snatched away by the FBI. Jockeying between the locals and the ugly Americans sets the acrimonious tone until one of the FBI agents, sympathetic to the Italians, turns out to have a connection to the killer. As he's done in the past (Villa of Mysteries, 2004), Hewson expertly blends historical material into the text. This time the key that unlocks the killer's psyche lies in Roman architecture--specifically, Vitruvius' "sacred cut," the idea that the perfect building uses as its starting point the proportions of the human body. Except our killer is carving his sacred cuts into the backs of his victims. All this historical detail gives the proceedings a tasty complexity comparable to Perez-Reverte, but what really makes the novel work is the interplay between the trio of antiestablishment Roman cops--all no-nonsense guys who find ways around whatever obstacles confront them. A masterful mix of the high-concept historical thriller and the cynical contemporary Italian procedural. Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved