THE VILLA OF MYSTERIES

When a Roman peat bog disgorges a corpse, the cops think it’s a mummy. Actually, it’s a daughter—that of a major wiseguy.

Peat, explains Questura pathologist Teresa Lupo, can have an effect not unlike mummification. Her first attempt to fix the cadaver’s age? “A touch under 2000 years.” Teresa isn’t often wrong, but this time she’s off by roughly two millennia. Sixteen years ago, it turns out, Eleanor, the 16-year-old stepdaughter of mobster Virgil Wallis had gone missing, and that’s who Rome’s state police has on its hands. Almost at once, interesting connections begin to surface between Wallis and archrival Emilio Neri; between Eleanor and Suzi, another missing teen; and, at length, between the recent past and antiquity, reaching back to dark Dionysian rites and rituals that contemporary sociopaths may have adapted to suit their own fashion in high-ticket depravity. Launching their investigation, Detective Nic Costa (A Season for the Dead, 2004) and his new partner, unstintingly good-natured Gianni Peroni, are in over their heads, but they’re solid, basically unflappable cops. They plod, they probe, and in a blistering denouement they get unexpected help from an angry woman who teaches a slew of thick-headed thugs that it’s not smart to mess with a Maenad.

Hewson is a confirmed overplotter, but, still, this is entertaining stuff, with a literate style and an appealing cast.