David Hewson (born 9 January 1953) is a contemporary British author of crime and mystery novels. His series of modern crime stories featuring an ensemble of police officers in Rome, led by the young detective Nic Costa, began with A Season for the Dead, and has now been contracted to run to at least nine instalments by British, American, European and Asian publishers. His first book, Semana Santa, set in Spain during Holy Week, was made into a movie starring Mira Sorvino, and won the W H Smith Fresh Talent prize for one of the best first novels of 1996. He has also written a number of standalone novels, including Lucifer's Shadow and The Promised Land and wrote the second chapter of the audio serial novel The Chopin Manuscript started by Jeffery Deaver, with Lee Child and 13 other co-writers, for the audiobook site Audible.com. Hewson was involved in the campaign against development by Imperial College at Wye, Kent, starting the web-site save-wye.org. His self-published account of this successful campaign, Saved, was published in April 2007.
Hewson left school at seventeen and joined a local newspaper in the north of England. He was later a news, business and foreign reporter for The Times, and features editor of The Independent when it was launched in 1986. He served as a board member of International Thriller Writers Inc. for four years until 2009. davidhewson.com
In 2008, Hewson and narrator Saul Reichlin won the prize for best unabridged audiobook in the UK for The Seventh Sacrament. In 2009 the sixth Nic Costa novel, The Garden of Evil, won the American Library Association's best genre fiction reading list award for mystery.