A Season for the Dead (Nic Costa Series #1) Book

Book 1 in the Nic Costa series published 2003.

What a strange and complex work this is.
Strange it might be but strange for all the right reasons.
Rome is the setting.
On one level it's a dark murder mystery that only gets darker the further into the book you go. There are a few OMG jaw dropping moments but there was one particular moment that was so OMG, jaw dropping that it made my eye look like organ stops and that doesn't happen to me very often.
Then there were the instructive components.
We find out who the psychopath is fairly early on in the book but why he is doing what he is doing takes a bit longer.
He's a man on a mission, bringing sinners to the lord. But to do the job properly his victims have to endure what the early martyrs endured and these martyrs met some pretty gruesome ends. So along the way we get a pretty good introduction into the lives of some of these early Christian Martyrs and the churches dedicated to them.
Then we have Nic Costa a young detective working with the Rome police who is one of the team working the case. Nic has an obsession, Caravaggio, almost to the point of being anal. To Nic 'Caravaggio' spoke the truth in the 16 hundreds and if you but take a good look at his paintings you will find the same truths still hold true to-day.
I was so entranced by Nic's rumination on Caravaggio that I found myself researching his life and works for hours.

So, for me, the book succeeded on three different levels.
1. It was a great murder mystery.
2. I learned a lot about Christian Martyrdom.
3. Caravaggio has gone from, for me, an obscure artist that I knew next to nothing about to an artist of major significance.

Highly recommended 4 stars