David Hewson’s latest thriller is called THE LIZARD’S BITE, but CSI: VENICE would be more like it. Never having read any of Hewson’s previous novels, I felt a bit lost. It opens with a fire in a glass factory, and I had no idea that it was set in modern times until the mention of the words “FBI” and “Reebok.”
BITE is part of the Nic Costa series, focusing on a cop who works mainly in Rome. It seems he did something bad in the last book, since his superiors have sent him and his partner down to Venice to work. The story takes a leisurely pace; I’m talking walking-around-the-seven-hills-of-Rome pace. The aforementioned fire kills the husband and wife who run the place. Slowly – and again, let me state, slowly – we learn that the couple might not have been married for the right reasons, with the wife’s family also in the glass buisness and looking down on her hubby’s operation.
There are plenty of false leads for our detective to follow, with a big one being the dead wife was pregnant (but not with help from the husband) and another being the addition of a Englishman with a sordid past of trying to buy up land for a gallery/museum. Then there are all the families involved who seem to be up to no good.
Setting a detective novel in Venice is an original idea, but BITE just drags on too long, meandering all over the place for my liking. The series has its fans who will eat up the locations and history, but I would have been a tad happier if he could have trimmed it down some. By the time we find out all the who’s and why’s, I felt a bit drained and punch-drunk. –Bruce Grossman
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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THESE AUTHORS:
• THE SACRED CUT by David Hewson
