Dynastic machinations shape Maria’s life; she is an aristocrat, a renowned beauty and a pawn in the internecine rivalries of the ruling Neapolitan families, which in turn are manipulated by the ambitions of the princes of the Catholic Church. From her first, youthful marriage, Maria has a beloved nine-year-old daughter. She has since given birth to eight children, none of whom has survived infancy. Her first husband, Federigo Carafa, was assassinated in revenge for his clan’s defence of Spanish interests – Naples was then the capital of the Spanish empire. Maria was then married to an older Sicilian aristocrat, Alfonso Gioeni, Marquis of Giulianova.

The novel opens with Maria’s return to Naples from Messina after Alfonso’s sudden death three weeks earlier. She is awaiting a dispensation from Pope Pius to enter into her third arranged marriage. This time her future husband is a younger man, a cousin whom she knew briefly as a child. Until Maria’s death, Hammond’s fiction is female-centric but never overtly proselytising. Maria is a talented designer and appreciates the arts; she starts to write a biography of her great aunt, Costanza d’Avalos, warrior princess, poet and one-time governor of Ischia; she enjoys a close bond with her Aunt Antonia, an independent widow; and she renews a sustaining intimacy with her first mother-in-law, Maddalena, matriarch of the powerful Carafas, and grandmother of Beatrice. There is also the affinity between herself and her loyal servant, Laura, and her reliance upon her Sicilian maid Sylvia’s healing skills and knowledge of herbal remedies. In this rigidly patriarchal world, it is the enigmatic and sinister figure of Maria’s new husband, Carlo, that compels our attention. An aesthete prone to depression, rages and masochistic sexual practices, he is a brilliant musician and composer, as was the historical Carlo Gesualdo. Carlo’s interest in Maria is confined to the aesthetic (she must always look beautiful), and the proprietorial (she must do nothing to compromise his name). He controls his household in dictatorial and unpredictable ways – he is prone to alarming asthma attacks – and his interaction with young Beatrice is so menacing that, at the age of twelve, she is married to one of her Carafa cousins at her grandmother Maddalena’s behest.

Already depressed after the birth of her ninth child and devastated at Beatrice’s death from a miscarriage at the age of thirteen, Maria falls into an intense love affair with Fabrizio Carafa, a cousin of her late first husband. This is where the novel really falters. Hammond’s knowledge of the period is considerable and deployed in lively ways – the scene when Maria and Beatrice are escorted by an armed guard along dangerous Spaccanapoli, threatened by thugs hostile to the Carafas, is vivid – but once sex and desire appear, the bodice-ripper takes over. In their consuming passion, Maria and Fabrizio take terrifying risks to be together, inciting Carlo’s bloody vengeance. After the murders, which are graphically described, the novel continues with almost matter-of-fact detail about Carlo’s subsequent life as a musician. Curiously, given that Carlo is the ‘devil’ of the title, Hammond’s prose switches from purple to reportage. This has a lopsided effect and raises questions about the previous characterisation of Carlo. Recently I reread, and was swept away by, Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel about his forebears, The Leopard (1958). Set in 1860 in Sicily, during the years of the Risorgimento, Lampedusa’s delicately controlled irony is a marvel. The reader enters the complex subjectivity of the protagonist, Prince Fabrizio of Cobera, whose initial feelings of patrician outrage and amused disdain become pragmatic resignation as he watches Sicily’s movement from brutal feudalism to corrupt modernity. The prince’s sense of his own ageing and loss of sexual prowess becomes a metaphor for the decline of his class. Often funny and never a costume melodrama, The Leopard sets the bar very high for the hybrid genre of historical fiction; it is deeply satisfying both as literature and as a serious enquiry into the past. While Hammond has written an enjoyable and informative novel, its intellectual rewards are limited by its lack of ironic distance and by its unreliability of tone.