The fireworks from last year’s Festa del Redentore
This year is the first since the war (I think) without fireworks for the Festa del Redentore, the biggest event in the Venetian calendar. For five centuries Venetians have continued to celebrate the delivery of the city from the plague, crossing a purpose-built pontoon-bridge towards the Palladian church of the Redentore on the Giudecca – and enjoying a fantastic firework display on the Saturday night preceding the actual feast-day (the second Sunday in July).
It is this event that provides the grim deadline for the protagonist of David Hewson’s new stand-alone novel, Shooter in the Shadows. It is probably not an accident that the novel came out on the Saturday of the Redentore – but it was presumably not envisioned that this particular year, by grim irony, a new pandemic would mean that there would be no fireworks. However, reading the novel makes up for the absence.
The novel is set on a remote island in the northern stretches of the Venetian lagoon, where a failing American journalist and novelist, Tom Honeyman, is forced to re-investigate the true story behind his first and only successful book: an investigation into a horrific double murder in the small town of Prosper, New York. The crumbling gothic mansion Honeyman bought with the proceeds of his first novel becomes his prison, with a mysterious ‘shooter in the shadows’ who has managed to penetrate his own computer, by means of which he instructs him to re-write that first book – but telling the true story this time. This means finding out who the real murderer was on that small lake in upper-state New York. He is given a four-day deadline – and the word is used literally: failure to abide by these terms means he will suffer the same fate as the original victims.
It is extremely compelling, moving between the lagoon and the small town of Prosper, between present and past, with continual twists and turns – and it races towards a fittingly pyrotechnical climax. There is not much Venice in the novel, but few writers have used the remote and mysterious backwaters of the lagoon so well. The protagonist is not, at first encounter, a particularly likeable character but we are gradually made to sympathise with his dilemma – and we become fully involved in his search for a very disturbing final truth.