Tag: omens of death

The Power of Story by Richard Kurti

A few weeks ago, I was standing outside St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, gazing at the ancient Egyptian obelisk that sits in the middle of the square. (It’s also on the front cover of Omens of Death — the first book in The Basilica Diaries series.)

A fresco in the Vatican depicting preparations for the erection of the obelisk in front of St Peter’s Basilica. Photograph taken by Richard Kurti.

The guide who was showing me round said, “There’s an interesting story about this obelisk. When Moses was a young man, he was educated in Heliopolis (modern Cairo), where this obelisk originally stood. As he hurried back and forth to school, Moses would have seen this very stone every day. Even then it was a thousand years old. He would have walked past it, used it as a meeting point for friends, maybe even sat in its shade.

“Now, cut forward across time. The Romans have stolen the obelisk and brought it to Italy, where the Emperor Caligula ordered it to be set up at the Circus of Nero just outside the city walls. And that is the same place where St Peter was executed. Which means the very last thing St Peter saw before he died would have been this obelisk. And now you are gazing at the exact same stone.”

I could feel my brain jolt. Moses, Caligula, St Peter and myself, all connected across 4,500 years by a single object. These were no longer remote characters from the pages of the Bible — if I reached out my hand, I could touch them through this granite obelisk.

What the guide did was a brilliant demonstration of the power of narrative. He could have bombarded me with facts and figures about the height and weight of the obelisk, about where the stone was quarried and when it was carved, and how it was moved from the Circus of Nero to its current site and erected in a single day.

But he didn’t, because he knew that those facts would have gone in and out of my mind in seconds. Instead, he told a story that organised the truth in such a way that it connected me to the distant past.

That’s what I’ve been attempting to do on every page of The Basilica Diaries historical thrillers. I have spent countless hours researching the novels, but rather than bombard the reader with details, I have tried to organise the truth into narratives that will resonate with the modern world whilst also transporting us back across the centuries.

I hope you enjoy the latest adventure in the series, Carnival of Chaos, which will be published in April.

St Peter’s Basilica by Richard Kurti

Richard Kurti is the author of the Basilica Diaries Medieval Mysteries series: historical thrillers set in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Rome and featuring a brother and sister investigative duo.

Donato Bramante (1444-1514) was the brilliant architect who designed St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and oversaw the initial stages of construction. If you could put him in a time machine, bring him forward five hundred years, and lay out the current problems of the HS2 railway line before him, I doubt he would be very surprised. Bramante discovered the hard way that huge, ambitious construction projects that test the limits of technology always run into the same dilemmas and have the same questions hanging over them:

Why build it at all?

Isn’t the existing structure good enough?

What philosophy should drive the new project?

How can you prevent the costs ballooning out of control?

Will the public lose interest and turn against you?

How will you cope with unforeseen complications?

How will you prevent corrupt builders skimming off vast sums for their own personal enrichment?

Take a moment to think about building something like St Peter’s without the use of computers, high-powered machinery or sophisticated scientific instruments. It took one hundred and twenty years, and Bramante was long dead by the time it was completed, but its construction was still a lot quicker than Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, or York Minster. And once built, these cathedrals have stood the test of time. How many railway lines will still be operating half a millennia after they were constructed?

The triumph of this superhuman achievement inspired me to write a series of novels centred on the construction of St Peter’s. Each murder mystery swirls around a different theme linked to the vast building project. Omens of Death explores the morality of building St Peter’s in the first place; Palette of Blood focuses on the vicious battle between artists competing to design it; and the newest book, Demon of Truth, shows what happens when you make a catastrophic discovery mid-construction.

Although the novels are fictional thrillers, I spent a lot of time doing research to find elements that grounded the stories in the sixteenth century, but also resonated with the dilemmas of the modern world.

So, the next time you find yourself on a rail replacement bus service, why not download some Basilica Diaries to while away the time?

Omens of Death is Published Today

Congratulations to Richard Kurti, whose absorbing historical mystery, Omens of Death, is published today! Omens of Death is the first book in the Basilica Diaries Medieval Mysteries series, set in fifteenth-century Rome.

1497, Rome

Wealthy merchant’s daughter Cristina Falchoni has a vision: to create a magnificent cathedral in the heart of Rome. Europe is in desperate need of a powerful unifying symbol, and a great basilica, built over the tomb of St Peter, will be a rallying point for Western civilisation.

With the help of her brother Domenico, as Head of Security at the Vatican, Cristina manages to persuade Pope Alexander VI to cleanse his conscience by reviving a decades old plan to construct a new basilica as a celebration of God’s greatness. Whatever bribery, corruption, lechery, or assassination lay in the Borgia Pope’s past, all would be forgiven; he could atone through stone.

But when a prominent aristocrat is found brutally murdered in a grotesque parody of the martyrdom of St Peter, Pope Alexander fears it is a divine warning, a message from God not to tamper with the revered shrine.

Realising that their dream of a glorious new cathedral is in jeopardy, Cristina and Domenico urgently start to investigate the grisly murder.

But as more ominous events torment Rome, they soon realise that whoever is behind these strange portents will stop at nothing to get their own way — even if it means killing the Pope himself.

With the Pope’s life in danger, can Cristina and Domenico uncover the truth before it’s too late? Or are they about to become the killer’s next targets?