Corpses aplenty and a legal fight to stay alive

A Season for the Dead

David Hewson

Dell: 496 pp., $6.99 paper

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The Villa of Mysteries

David Hewson

Delacorte: 352 pp., $22

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Conviction

Richard North Patterson

Random House: 470 pp., $25.95

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In “A Season for the Dead,” David Hewson takes us to Rome in that ancient city’s most picturesque and frazzled aspects. A Vatican that’s full of secrets and caustic whirlpools of deception: a murderous lunatic priest too well-protected by his church or someone in it; a bent cardinal; foolish people who invite trouble; a wise old father and his rash detective son, Nic Costa; Costa’s authoritative boss, Inspector Leo Falcone; and an intrepidly meddling forensic pathologist, Teresa Lupo. Recurrent litanies of Roman street names and place names provide elegiac punctuation to a string of sadistically inventive murders and much collateral damage. That’s pretty much all that you need to know about an oft-grisly tale that never quite founders in its slough of lies.

Hewson philosophizes a great deal about the human condition, but also keeps one guessing, perplexed and horrified. The end is a bit thin -- though adequate for a film that wouldn’t be too bad. The nearly 500 pages that lead up to that end are absolutely super.

Now comes the second panel of a promised trilogy. “The Villa of Mysteries” also unfolds in Rome and also stars Falcone, Costa and a cast of thousands -- quite literally, if you count all the tourists. Although it features more corpses than its predecessor and just as much suspense, it is more deliberate, more discursive and less exciting.

This time it’s not the Vatican and its minions but Dionysian mysteries, maenads, their murders and manipulations: banshees from Hell, phantoms of some opera and the mummeries of allegedly ancient ritual. Teresa Lupo, the pathologist, is as predictably intrusive as ever, and Hewson dishes up plenty of convolutions.

But in the long run and sometimes in the short their unfolding does not convince, the thrills do not ensnare, the furtive orgies fall flat, too many inner lives intrude upon the action. Though intermittently manic, Falcone is too distracted; Costa -- more rash than ever -- too star-crossed. Perhaps the one will be allowed to concentrate on his job, the other will grow up, in Hewson’s next beautifully wrought episode.

“Conviction” is about two brothers in their early 20s, Peyton and Rennell Price: one a run-of-the-mill lowlife, the other retarded, the two of them convicted of forcing a 9-year-old-girl into oral sex during which the child choked and died. Tried in 1987 and sentenced to death for her murder like his brother, Peyton is executed soon after the book opens. Rennell’s execution is but weeks away when lawyer Terri Paget is detailed to serve as counsel, shepherding Rennell’s last appeals through the chain of courts that have already rejected earlier ones.

Rennell understands little about his predicament except that he does not want to die. Opposed to the death penalty, Paget is determined to save him from execution by any and every means the law affords. So “Conviction” becomes an extended argument against the death penalty, vividly illustrated by scenes from the bleak lives of creatures who might be better off dead and by graphically detailed evocations of the appeals process, legal quandaries and strategies, plus plenty of legal jousts all the way to the Supreme Court.

Patterson’s deft narrative structure ranges back and forth between 1987 and the present, sparing us little of the circuitous tactics, acrid schisms and abrasive disagreements of defenders, prosecutors, judges and expert witnesses. The suspense keeps one panting right up to the end. Readers partial to exhaustive and exhausting legal argument will find themselves well-served. *