Carnival for the Dead - Softcover

David Hewson was born in Yorkshire. He was a journalist from the age of seventeen, working most recently for the Sunday Times. The Plague Doctor is his twelfth novel.

Hewson’s celebrated Nic Costa series takes a fascinating detour here, with the setting moving from Rome to Venice and most of the cast (Costa, Leo Falcone, and Gianni Peroni) on hiatus. That leaves pathologist Teresa Lupo on the case, and a very personal one it is. Teresa’s favorite aunt, Sofia, has gone missing in Venice, and it’s up to the pathologist to turn investigator in an effort to find her. The trail is strewn with leads—Sofia was an outgoing sort who told her story to all and sundry—but matters are complicated by Carnival, Venice’s annual festival, which draws drunken tourists in record numbers. Further muddying the lagoons are several murders and a suicide that appear, somehow, to be connected to Sofia’s disappearance. Teresa, who prefers working on dead bodies to investigating live ones, is awash in confusion until mysterious parcels begin arriving at her door containing stories that elliptically attempt to point her in the right direction. As the fact-bound pathologist slowly moves closer to unraveling the mystery, she is forced to confront a Horatio-like epiphany, that the world contains ambiguities not resolvable by logic alone. The stories within the story tend to slow the narrative a bit, but Hewson once again combines landscape and character into a rich and satisfying whole.