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While this is ostensibly a Nic Costa mystery, readers could be forgiven for seeing underground Rome itself as the novel's protagonist. The author spent considerable time in Rome prior to writing the mystery (photographs that he took there are available on the Net) and his research pays off. His descriptions of the subterranean world evoke lifelike pictures in the reader's mind. Fourteen years in the past, Giorgio Bramante is an academic, loving father to Alessio, who has just turned seven. Giorgio has made a stunning discovery in subterranean Rome which he has not disclosed to his students but six of them are aware of something of the mystery and go underground to witness the wonders Giorgio has uncovered. Giorgio has taken his son into the honeycomb of tunnels, then has abandoned him. The students, led by one of their number who is devoted to the idea of the Mithraean religion, capture Alessio. The lad disappears from his family and Leo Falcone is one of the team investigating the disappearance. The investigation is going nowhere and the then Commissario, Arturo Messina, is at his wits' end. In frustration, over Falcone's protests, he leaves one of the detained students with the aggrieved father. Bramante beats the student to death. Fourteen years later, Bramante is released from prison. Arturo's son Bruno, somewhat estranged from his father, is now the Commissario and, like his father, feels discomfited by Falcone, but for a different reason. In the old days, Falcone was young and ambitious; in the present, he is older, injured and weak, but still subordinate to a Messina. Nonetheless, he is in charge of the investigation. A school T-shirt belonging to Alessio was given to a church when the child disappeared. At the time it was marred by a bloodstain. Periodically, the bloodstain is mysteriously renewed. The students involved in the original kidnapping are, somehow, turning up dead, despite having changed their names. Now there are only two left alive -- but Bramante was in prison when some of the men were murdered so how could he be a suspect? As already indicated, underground Rome is beautifully depicted and brought to life. The reader learned a little, too, about the religion of Mithras, which was displaced by Christianity. To my mind, the characters lack a certain something. Falcone seems the most three-dimensional of the lot but even he is not as fully fleshed as he might have been. The disappearance of a child always provokes strong feelings. Perhaps it is just my jaded viewpoint that I feel the old case could, perhaps, have been resolved as quickly in the past as it is in the present. Perhaps it was simply the absence of some of the key players of the present in the old investigation that hampered a successful resolution but still . . . I do have one other quibble. It seems to me that the difference between 'sacrament' and 'sacrifice' is not made clear. At times, the usage appears to make them equivalent. For people interested in the archaeology of Rome and the religion of the old Roman soldiers, THE SEVENTH SACRAMENT will no doubt be an absorbing read.
Reviewed by Denise Pickles, February 2007
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