The eighth Nic Costa novel, The Blue Demon (UK) and City of Fear (US), is set entirely in Rome and the area north of the city stretching towards Tuscany known as the Maremma. It’s the first book in the series set in the world of international politics.

The narrative takes place over a few days in which Rome comes to a halt with the arrival of a world G8 summit due to take place in the Quirinale Palace, the former pope’s palazzo that sits atop the Quirinal Hill. A minor Italian politician has been kidnapped, apparently in an attempt to extract information about the summit. Costa and Falcone are summoned to the Quirinale for a meeting with the Italian president, Dario Sordi, and his security advisers. There they learn that a former terrorist band known as The Blue Demon, long thought dead, has seemingly revived and is threatening to bring chaos to the city for the summit. Sordi, a wily friend of Costa’s late father, believes there is more to the story than meets the eye and wants him and his friends to look more closely at the background of these home-grown terrorists, led by a former professor of Etruscan studies, Andrea Petrakis.

Read more background here

As always I try to blend real Italian history into a modern fictional tale. Part of the story concerns the tragically limited legacy of the Etruscan nation, the predecessors of Imperial Rome who saw their language and culture effectively destroyed when they were defeated by the predecessors of Caesar. While most of the story takes place in Rome there is a brief detour into the Maremma where the vivid and occasionally shocking tombs of the Etruscans have been excavated (and there is a real life Blue Demon, not that he’s easily seen).

The story also embraces more modern history, that of the tragic ‘Years of Lead’ when Italy was gripped by domestic terrorism from both left and right. The true nature of these outrages is now largely known. Their real-life provenance may come as a shock to those unfamiliar with recent Italian history which is why I provide a detailed author’s note at the end of the book. Truth sometimes really is stranger than fiction.

I also wanted to delve a little into Costa’s family background. His father died in the first book of the series, A Season for the Dead. He always struck me as a very interesting character, and I know a number of readers felt the same way. So in this book, through the character of Dario Sordi, we learn more about him and begin to understand something of his fate, and how his own personality shaped that of his son.

But these are subterranean currents in what I hope is a fast-moving and exciting story, a tale of intrigue and political assassination of the cruellest kind. It’s no coincidence that Sordi reveals to Costa in the book that a gift he gave his late father comprised the two books Robert Graves wrote, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, about the dangers of life in the Imperial court of Rome two thousand years ago. I write about history not for history’s sake, but to try to point up how little human beings have changed over the millennia. Sordi’s fondness for the books finds him reading them towards the story’s climax, and this is no accident.

I started writing this story in the summer of 2007 and finished it around July 2008. During that time real-life Italian politics changed enormously. I’m merely a storyteller. I foresaw none of this, nor any of the more recent shenanigans that have shaken the nation’s political classes of late, however much they may seem to mesh with certain aspects of the story.