What do You think about The Lizard's Bite (2007)?
THE LIZARD’S BITE (Pol. Proc.-Ensemble-Venice-Cont) – GHewson, David – 4th in seriesDell Suspense, 2006, US Paperback – ISBN: 9780440243007First Sentence: In the shifting darkness of the vessel’s bowels, low over the undulating black water, the animal waited, trembling.*** Roman police officers Nick Costa and Gianni Peroni think they are going to get some time off with their girlfriends, former FBI agent Emily Deacon and pathologist Teresa Lupo. But things change when their boss, Leo Falcone shows up and the three of them are told they are to investigate the deaths of a Moreno glass worker and his wife. But the pressure is on as wealthy Englishman, Hugo Massiter is about to buy the island currently owned by the victim’s family. The three policemen are told to investigate the deaths quickly and verify the man killed his wife and then died of spontaneous combustion. With the help of their girlfriends, the three policemen finds things are not as simple as hoped.*** As a big Donna Leon fan, this was an interesting perspective of Roman policemen working in Venice. Many of the things Leon’s Insp. Brunelli loves about Venice, these detectives hate. However, the corruption of some of the Italian police remains a consistent theme. There are a lot of interesting characters, but the story was short on character development. It was really the twists and turns along the way that kept me reading.
—LJ
In David Hewson's The Lizard Bite, the 4th installment in the Nic Costa series, Nic and the rest of his team in the Carabineri tackled another hard core mystery. The Arcangelo family lived on their private island in a decaying palazzo and making glass in their factory. But now the world comes to them when there's a vaporetti of police embarked on their private property, when two members of their family died in a foundry fire. For Nic Costa and her partner, they were on a special assignment and knew that two members of that family were murdered. A predatory tEnglishman was a suspect as the family of the women were persons of interest, too. As they want the police to go away, when they can't, when a matter of lies, death and desire turns murderously on one of them.
—Kristen
Has the most impressive story and its characters are believable and livable.The reason the two venitien cops and their wives are involved, its rather a life style for them, and is because they're leading in investigations, it wasn’t to get involved with the family, which nearly seemed to become the point. But where as Falcone takes a sudden infatuation for the miss Arcangeli during the investigation, and falls for her. Supposing to be a old family, who once had wealth, now living remotely on their own island, and with their own buisness of shaping glass figurines for a living. Massiter is a project-a-holic of quailty type, while bearing a mark of indifference, his difference is of a cover-up getting slowly exposed of his personal involvement, maybe blame. He appears all cool headed about his work though, meanwhile, and takes a chance now and then to achieve what he’s believing in.
—Arthur
