Lucifer's Shadow

Complex, beautiful, suspenseful, Lucifer’s Shadow was David Hewson’s tantalising and rewarding novel first novel set in Italy, now republished with a new introduction by the author. Previously republished in some markets as The Cemetery of Secrets.

When Daniel Forster, a young Englishman, arrives in Venice for a summer job, he soon finds that the city’s glittering facade masks a much darker reality. Cataloguing a library of old manuscripts, Daniel discovers a lost musical masterpiece, and is drawn into a game of deception, leading to a vertiginous spiral of criminal conspiracy and erotic pursuit, with its roots in the political minefield of Vivaldi’s Venice. Thus two stories, centuries apart, are intercut and eventually drawn together in a stunning double-twist ending that will leave the reader gasping for breath.

'Richly enjoyable... sophisticated and beguiling entertainment'. Sunday Times