Lucifer's shadow - David Hewson

When a young Englishman arrives in Venice for a summer job, he finds that the city's glittering facade masks a much darker reality. Cataloguing an old library, he discovers a lost musical masterpiece, and is drawn into a game of deception, with its roots in the political minefield of Vivaldi's Venice.

Venice 1733: the young Lorenzo Scacchi has just arrived in the city to work for his uncle at the renowned printing press of Ca' Scacchi. Awed by Venice's splendour, Lorenzo discovers a world of possibilities he has never before dreamed of. But he finds a darker side too. Ordered by his uncle to chaperone a beautiful and gifted violinist who cannot openly reveal her identity, Lorenzo is drawn into a dangerous game of deception, with horrifying consequences.

More than 250 years later, a young Englishman, Daniel Forster, comes to Venice for a summer job and is immediately seduced by the city's beauty and exoticism. Cataloguing a library in the Ca' Scacchi, Daniel discovers the manuscript of an anonymous eighteenth-century concerto. Soon he has become involved in an elaborate scam, leading to a vertiginous spiral of criminal conspiracy and erotic pursuit.

David Hewson brilliantly interweaves two stories of intrigue and corruption, set centuries apart, and eventually draws them together in a stunning double-twist ending. Complex, beautiful, suspenseful, Lucifer's Shadow is Hewson's most tantalising and rewarding novel yet.