One hot August evening, Costa arrives moments after an English academic named Malise Gabriel has fallen to his death from a fifth-floor balcony outside his apartment on the Via Beatrice Cenci. The dead man’s angelic, 17-year-old daughter Mina soon appears, as does her older brother, Robert, who brandishes a gun and flees. The death at first appears accidental, but emerging facts point to murder, one that increasingly recalls the Cenci tragedy.
The father’s fall from a balcony echoes the death of Francesco Cenci, whose family allegedly flung him from a window. There are hints that Gabriel might have had sex with Mina. And the ethereal, sensitive Mina not only resembles Beatrice but is obsessed with her. One day, she takes Nic on a tour of the places where the martyred girl lived, was executed and is buried. (They view the celebrated painting of Beatrice, formerly attributed to Guido Reni, which is on display in Rome today.)
It would be wrong to say more about the ingenious plot, except that I read anxiously — devouring many twists, revelations and ironies — to learn who killed Mina’s father and whether their relationship had been incestuous.
There is much else going on in the novel. Nic, a capable and ambitious detective, is part of a team that includes older detectives and a coroner. Despite conflicts, these men and women view themselves as a family and are presented as people who hope that “in some small way, their mutual efforts represented a glimmer of hope, a trace of humanity, in a world going bad.”
We see that other, bad world when Robert’s role as a small-time drug dealer leads us into sordid bars where young tourists, sent to Rome for culture, wallow in drink, drugs and one another.
Besides the Cenci saga, other bits of history punctuate the story. Mina’s late father was an atheist who greatly admired Galileo and spoke angrily of the pope who forced the great scientist, on pain of death, to recant his belief that the Earth revolves around the sun. He also expressed his scorn for the present pope, who is said to have defended the Catholic Church’s persecution of Galileo in his pre-Vatican days.
As always, Hewson offers many glimpses of Rome. Costa sits “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.” Moments later, he glimpses “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.” Lovers of Rome may savor the Costa novels just for images such as these.
But finally, this is a novel about evil. After I reviewed Philip Kerr’s new Bernie Gunther novel recently, a friend told me she wouldn’t read it because she didn’t want to deal with the horrors of World War II. And who can blame her? Kerr and Hewson, two excellent novelists, are both writing about evil but on vastly different scales: one cosmic, the other focused on a single family. Hewson is saying that the evil that destroyed Beatrice Cenci’s family can exist today. Certain details change, but the lust, the greed, the hatred and the basic darkness endure. It’s hard to see how the author could have made his dark tale more fascinating, entertaining and yet entirely serious than he has.
Anderson regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Post.
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