The Flood

August 24, 2015
Distinctive characters compensate for the at times slow-moving plot of Hewson’s atmospheric Italian mystery, set mainly in Florence in 1986. Pino Fratelli, a semiretired carabineer, meets British graduate student Julia Wellbeloved, who’s studying the connection between violence and art, at a Florentine chapel, where a fresco of Adam and Eve has been defaced with blood. The culprit is Aldo Pontecorvo, who’s involved with a gunrunner for the Red Brigade. Hewson (Carnival for the Dead) doesn’t generate much suspense with the crime-solving efforts, even after the decapitation murder of an aristocrat. Nicely rendered chapters set 20 years earlier, during the historical flood of the title provide some colorful, though not strictly necessary, background. The book’s greatest strength is the engaging relationship that develops among Pino, Julia, and 22-year-old Luca Cassini, the not-so-bright carabineer assigned to help them. Readers who want to see more of this trio can only hope that their next case will be more intriguing.

November 1, 2015
Hewson, author of the riveting Nic Costa series, set in Rome, returns to ItalyFlorence this timeand to one of his favorite themes: the mixture of the sacred and the profane in the great works of the Italian Renaissance. Julia Wellbeloved is an English art student in Florence to work on a paper about what leads deranged individuals to defame works of art. Such a defamation has occurred in Florence's Brancacci Chapel, and its aftermath brings Julia together with Pino Fratelli, a police detective on medical leave who desperately wants back in the game. It's 1986, 20 years after the great Florence flood, and the reverberations from that disaster continue to be felt by the city's residents. Julia soaks knowledge from Fratelli about Florentine art and crime, while he uses his friendship with the student to work the edges of this latest incident, which he sees correctly as the beginning of something much bigger and more deadly. Alternating between the points of view of Julia, Fratelli, and a seemingly crazed serial killer, Hewson spins an engrossing tale of art and murder. Pair this with Robert Hellenga's The Sixteen Pleasures (1994), also about the aftermath of the flood.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)