The Blue Demon - Tapa dura

Twenty years ago, a mysterious group called the Blue Demon committed a series of bizarre and ritualistic crimes evoking the legacy of the lost race of the Etruscans, and leaving in their wake a group of dead students, a murdered couple, a cryptic message and a kidnapped child. Now, the leaders of the G8 are descending on Rome for a summit at the Quirinale Palace. But when a politician is found ritually murdered, seemingly by a strange young man dressed as an Etruscan god, detective Nic Costa suspects that the old case was never really solved. The Blue Demon appear to have returned - and planning, under the leadership of the fanatical Andrea Petrakis, to unleash a devastating sequence of attacks on the city. As Costa and his team start to dig deeper into the past, they find that there are still too many unanswered questions - and much more to the history of the Blue Demon than anyone wants to admit . . .

Former Sunday Times journalist David Hewson is well known for his crime-thriller fiction set in European cities. He is the author of the highly acclaimed The Killing novels set in Denmark, the Detective Nic Costa series set in Italy and the Pieter Vos series in Amsterdam. The Killing trilogy is based on the BAFTA award-winning Danish TV series created by Soren Sveistrup and produced by DR, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. While he lives in Kent, Hewson's ability to capture the sense of place and atmosphere in his fiction comes from spending considerable research time in the cities in which the books are set: Copenhagen, Rome, Venice and Amsterdam.