The unseen girl was screaming again, at the top of her voice. There was real agony and fear in her cries, not the drunkenness and violence he’d come to recognise over the years. He could see his concern reflected in Agata’s shocked features… Costa ran across the riverside road and down towards the tortuous web of lanes and alleys that meandered in every direction out from the ghetto like a tangle of veins an arteries wound around the human heart…
When British academic Malise Gabriel falls to his death from a Rome apartment, detective Nic Costa rapidly comes to realise that there is much more to the accident than he first thought. It also becomes apparent that Malise’s family — mysterious and tragic daughter Mina, stoic wife Cecilia and troubled son Robert — may be keeping vital information hidden.

Nic becomes obsessed with the case, intrigued by Mina’s story which seems to be linked to the sixteenth-century real-life tragedy of a young Italian noblewoman, Beatrice Cenci.

As the investigation deepens, Rome’s dark and seedy side is uncovered, revealing a tangle of deceit, treachery and corruption. Costa realises that the key to the truth lies with the Gabriels. Why are they so unwilling to co-operate, and who, or what, is the reason for their silence? The ninth novel in the Costa series is published by Pan Macmillan in the UK on February 4, 2011 and Delacorte in the US on April 26, 2011.
Intricately plotted and gorgeously written, THE FALLEN ANGEL weaves a spell that will entrap you until the final page. David Hewson’s Rome is dark and tantalizing, seductive and dangerous, a place where present-day crimes ring with the echoes of history.

Tess Gerritsen, author of THE KILLING PLACE

Hewson is one of our finest crime writers.  Absorbing, intelligent, and with a staggeringly vivid sense of place.  No author has ever brought Rome so alive for me — nor made it seem so sinister.

Peter James, author of the bestselling Roy Grace series
Browse David’s gallery of research photos of Roman locations for The Fallen Angel, from the Cenci church in the ghetto to the Italian State Police Black Museum.

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