Dante's Numbers [Paperback]

David Hewson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Macmillan (2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0230711316
• ISBN-13: 978-0230711310
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,127,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Hewson's novels have been translated into a wide range of languages, from Italian to Japanese, and his debut work, Semana Santa, set in Holy Week Spain, was filmed with Mira Sorvino. Dante's Numbers is his thirteenth published novel.

David was born in Yorkshire in 1953 and left school at the age of seventeen to work as a cub reporter on one of the smallest evening newspapers in the country in Scarborough. Eight years later he was a staff reporter on The Times in London, covering news, business and latterly working as arts correspondent. He worked on the launch of the Independent and was a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times for a decade before giving up journalism entirely in 2005 to focus on writing fiction.

Semana Santa won the WH Smith Fresh Talent award for one of the best debut novels of the year in 1996 and was later made into a movie starring Mira Sorvino and Olivier Martinez. Four standalone works followed before A Season for the Dead, the first in a series set in Italy. The seventh Roman novel featuring Nic Costa and his colleagues, Dante's Numbers, appeared in October 2008. At the end of 2006 he signed renewed contracts with Pan Macmillan in the UK and Bantam Dell in the US to extend the series to nine books, running to 2012. The titles are published in numerous languages around the world including Chinese and Japanese... and Italian.

He has featured regularly on the speaker lists of leading international book events, including the Melbourne and Ottawa writers' festivals, the Harrogate Crime Festival, Thrillerfest, Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime. He has taught at writing schools around the world and is a regular faculty member for the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in Corte Madera, California, where he has worked alongside writers such as Martin Cruz Smith and Michael Connelly.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Watch "Vertigo" before you read this book., July 11, 2009

By 

Arzani Burman - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dante's Numbers (Hardcover)

As someone who lived in San Francisco for 20 years, and just watched Vertigo on-line as soon as I saw it mentioned in the book, reading "Dante's Numbers" was a total delight. And that's saying something for a suspense novel with brutal murders - but I loved it and highly recommend it. This is a perfect book for people who enjoy San Francisco, Hitchcock and David Hewson.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Psychological shenanigans that make this novel first rate, April 21, 2009

By 

LC1 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dante's Numbers (Hardcover)

Many times, psychological twists in a novel are the mark of an insecure writer -- one who does not trust his characters to carry his story -- or a writer who defines a novel as nothing but plot shenanigans. These folks tend to hammer out improbable plot and psychological twists that have no merit except that of being unusual.

I read for character and writing style, not tricks or twists, although those can be nice. This novel it all. It's the best Hewson novel I've read, and one of the best books I've read lately, period.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Bewildering, April 30, 2009

By 

Sherry Christie (Jonesport, Maine) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dante's Numbers (Hardcover)

I've been a fan of David Hewson's Nic Costa series for a long time, so I expected good things when Hewson brought Costa and his cohorts to the U.S. to guard Italian artifacts being loaned to a California museum. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the weirdest book in the series, with a very peculiar set of crimes (peculiar in the sense of hard to believe), sort of linked to the old movie Vertigo. Most discouraging of all, there was no character development -- something Hewson has managed with great skill in the previous books based in Rome. It felt to me as if he was just pushing action figures through a very contrived plot. As long as Mr. H. doesn't let Nic marry the American love interest in this book, we may hope for better results with the next one.