Advance reader copy, with all its spelling and grammar errors.

From From Publishers Weekly;

A young Iraqi refugee named Laila provides both the heart and the McGuffin in Hewson's elegant new thriller, the third featuring tough Roman detectives Gianni Peroni and Nic Costa (A Season for the Dead and The Villa of Mysteries). Laila inadvertently witnesses a brutal murder in Rome's Pantheon and earns the guardianship of the top cops. Childless pathologist Teresa Lupo becomes a surrogate mother to the waif as the team slowly closes in on the killer. The position of the naked corpse suggests Leonardo da Vinci's The Vitruvian Man, and carvings on the victim's flesh depict the mystical symbol of the novel's title. The novel seems headed for Dan Brown territory, but Hewson's clever puzzle remains just that, a tantalizing challenge to the detectives and to the encroaching FBI, led by abrasive agents Joel Leapman and Emily Deacon. The perp, it seems, is a serial killer who has similarly carved several victims around the world. Though the novel unfolds via familiar genre conventions—creepy passages from the killer's perspective revealing equal parts of evil and genius, turf skirmishes between our Roman heroes and the FBI suits, imperiled female victims—Hewson's solid writing and multidimensional characters command attention from start to finish of this smart, literate thriller.

The ability of an author to get the reader to suspend disbelief is a rare talent and one that I rate quite high. Hewson doesn't quite make the leap to that height. The story has too many holes that seem plugged as an afterthought. Take for example the following scene,

A woman meets a charming man in a bar and decides to take him home with her. Never mind he is a priest. She is alone in Rome, during a freak Christmas snowstorm, and just can't resist this stranger's allure. They enjoy much wine and cultural chit-chat back at her rented apartment and she ends up falling into a drunken sleep. When she awakes, he is not there, and the door is bolted from the outside.

Our heroine does what every heroine trapped by a man who she suddenly has misgivings about trusting does, she snoops in his belongs. But, the light is bad in the apartment, so, even though there is a raging blizzard, she takes the bag outside to the balcony. There are heating elements on the porch, but you got to go "huh?!" And it gets better...or worse.

She gets to the bottom of the bag, and yup, discovers all sorts of mean instruments of torture. Her horror is complete when she hears a voice from a rooftop commenting on her noisiness. We know what will follow.

Okay, so how dim can lighting be that one wouldn't be able to look at the contents of a suitcase and be able to see what they are. It isn't like she needed to read fine print. And how the hell did the killer know she would take the bag to the balcony? All too ridiculous.

The story just didn't thrill or hold my attention, although I did finish it. I found the Italian protagonists way too American. And stereotypical Americans at that. Just not a well constructed story.

RELEASE NOTES:

Left on a table this morning.