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Summary
Summary
Set in two Venices, the modern physical world and its virtual counterpart, The Abomination by Jonathan Holt is a propulsive tale of murder, corruption, and international intrigue--the first book in an outstanding new trilogy in which Carabiniere Captain Kat Tapo must unravel a dark conspiracy linking the CIA and the Catholic Church.
By the stunning white dome of one of Venice's grandest landmarks a body with two slugs in the back of the head has been pulled from the icy waters. The victim is a woman, dressed in the sacred robes of a Catholic priest--a desecration that becomes known as the Abomination.
Working her first murder case, Captain Kat Tapo embarks on a trail that proves as elusive and complicated as the city's labyrinthine backstreets. What Kat discovers will test her loyalties and remind her of a simple truth: Unless old crimes are punished, corrupt forces will continue to repeat their mortal sins.
The Abomination is book one of Jonathan Holt's Carnivia Trilogy.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of British author Holt's diverting debut, Katerina Tapo, an officer in the Carabinieri, races to a crime scene in the heart of Venice. High tide has washed a body with two bullet wounds in the head onto the steps of a landmark church. It's Kat's first murder case-a case complicated by the discovery that the victim is female and dressed in the garb of a Catholic priest. Meanwhile, at a nearby American military base, 2nd Lt. Holly Boland's search for missing documents sets her on the scent of a mystery that compels the two women to team up. Clues to their questions are hidden at Carnivia.com, a beguiling cyber-Venice created by a rich hacker for an unknown purpose. Holt captures the allure of Venice and its creative cyber-counterpart, and creates two forceful if bland protagonists in Kat and Holly. The author gets carried away by throwing mystery on top of mystery, but, well, that's part of the fun. Agent: Caradoc King, A.P. Watt (U.K.). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In the first novel of a trilogy set in Venice, an Italian policewoman and a female U.S. Army officer investigate the murders of two women who threatened to expose dark secrets about America's involvement in the Bosnian War. Ambitious Carabinieri Capt. Katerina Tapo is on her first homicide case. Her American counterpart, 2nd Lt. Holly Boland, who grew up in Pisa as an Army brat, has just been posted to Italy. A young Croatian woman shockingly dressed in the robes of a Catholic priest and tattooed with mysterious symbols washes up in the Grand Canal, and a female American activist probing illicit U.S. support of Croatia in the '90s war is found with two bullets in her head. Powerful interests in Venice will do anything to hide the truth about U.S. operations in the former Yugoslavia, where Serbian and Croatian girls were forced into prostitution and tortured. After their paths intersect, Kat and Holly are targeted themselves. This all takes place under the watchful eye of Daniele Barbo, the genius bad boy of social networking, who created Carnivia, a 3-D simulation of Venice where members meet through avatars and share secrets. Whether Daniele is out to help or hinder Kat and Holly is one of the mysteries of this book, which has more than enough plot and well-drawn characters to stir interest in the sequels. The Carnivia site is such a clever invention an entire novel could be set inside its "walls." A skillfully rendered debut by a London ad man.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This remarkable debut novel starts off like a lot of Venetian crime novels body discovered in a canal, acqua alta getting everyone's feet wet but we quickly sense this is no ordinary mystery. The body is a woman dressed like a priest an abomination for many and the crime quickly leads Carabinieri captain Kat Tapo into much deeper and more treacherous waters than even a Venetian is accustomed to. When another murder victim is discovered, a connection develops between Kat's case and an investigation being conducted by an American army lieutenant, Holly Boland, who is on the trail of classified documents that could reveal CIA involvement in inciting civil war in the Balkans. Throw in a computer wizard who has created a virtual Venice, Carnivia.com, which has become a repository for every sort of secret sexual, political, religious and you have a multistranded conspiracy thriller with plenty of pop. Think Dan Brown without the clunky prose and the pompous PhD hero but with the fascinating mix of history, paranoia, and real-live terror (drones on your tail). Holt, an advertising director in London, expertly juggles the high-concept elements of his plot with the subtle character building that quickly establishes Kat and Holly as the kind of protagonists we will follow eagerly through the projected trilogy. Only one book in, many readers will find themselves asking, Why stop at three? --Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
If you really want to know what shape your hometown is in, just take a good look at the street you live on, trying to see it as a stranger might. That's the simple, heartbreaking truth Lori Roy delivers, sotto voce, in UNTIL SHE COMES HOME (Dutton, $26.95), a quietly shocking account of the tiny tremors in the life of a city that warn of cataclysms to come. In 1958, the residents of Alder Avenue aren't paying much attention to the signs of decay in their pleasant working-class Detroit neighborhood. They do notice when Dutch Elm disease starts to attack some of their beautiful old trees, and they can hardly ignore the empty factories ("rotting shells surrounded by boarded-up restaurants and taverns"). But most people just assume that if they keep to their daily rituals - husbands going off to work and coming home to a nice dinner and a tidy house, wives cooking, cleaning, taking care of their men (including the widowers, who never learned to take care of themselves) - maybe everybody will stay safe from whatever dangers are out there, just beyond the front door. The one thing these families can't ignore is the wave of poor people moving ever closer. Prostitutes solicit the men on payday; broken glass litters the alleys; unwelcome new families are squeezing into the Filmore Apartments. Although everyone is alarmed when a black woman is murdered, no one panics until a helpless, childlike white woman disappears after leaving Grace Richardson's house. Kind, generous, beautiful Grace and her best friend, neurotic but well-intentioned Julia Wagner, are the nicest people on Alder Avenue and the most reliable witnesses to its gradual disintegration. The sense of community remains intact for a while, as the husbands organize search parties for the missing woman and the wives go on cooking so the searchers can maintain their strength. But, one by one, these good people start breaking down, revealing the sad and in some cases shameful secrets they've kept locked away. Roy executes these transformations with such a delicate touch that the subtle alterations in a marriage, a friendship, a neighborhood hardly register - until the day someone looks around and realizes that all the trees have died. Venetians love to dress up in costumes and masks, especially in winter, during La Befana, the Feast of the Epiphany, and, of course, at Carnivale. Jonathan Holt puts a breathtaking spin on this charming custom in his first novel, THE ABOMINATION (Harper, $25.99), by inventing Carnivia, an elaborate computer game in which masked visitors enter a creepy 3-D mirror world of Venice. He also pulls off a nasty twist on the rituals of disguise when the body of a woman dressed as a Roman Catholic priest washes up on the steps of a church. Unfortunately, Holt jumps the genre boundaries of police procedural, international thriller and political conspiracy potboiler for his overstuffed tale of a military, religious, criminal and political cabal. The plot is preposterous, but there's something truly haunting about those glimpses into the mysterious shadow world of Carnivia, where masked avatars meet for assignations in perfect replicas of Venetian landmarks. And while some interesting, even desirable, men figure in the story, the action is entrusted to two strong female characters whose commitment to solving crimes against women is so fierce they turn the whole adventure into a declaration of feminist rage. Although he lives in Canada, Michael Hiebert has a Southern SOUl. DREAM WITH LITTLE ANGELS (Kensington, paper, $15) is set in Alvin, Ala., a pretty rural town that looks idyllic but holds some deep, dark secrets. Ruby Mae Vickers is Alvin's most bitter secret, a little girl who went missing in 1975 and whose body was found months later under a willow tree. That long-ago murder still haunts Leah Teal, the police officer who failed to solve the case and who works herself into a panic when more little girls begin to vanish. There's something mesmerizing about Hiebert's storytelling voice, low-pitched and lightly musical, which he assigns to Abe, Leah's 11-year-old son. Abe is a sweet, sensitive boy who can watch the sun shine on a cemetery and reflect that it's "sort of like a nice park for all the dead people to play Frisbee with their dead dogs." But he also has a young boy's morbid fascination with matters macabre, which interferes with his mother's police work but gives him the grown-up insight that just might make up for the loss of his childhood innocence. Tom Piccirilli polished off his previous novel, "The Last Kind Words," by getting rid of some red-blooded members of a family of burglars and con men, all named after dogs and bearing canine tattoos. Terrier, the youngest son, made it through, and his father, Pinscher, is still the alpha dog. But big brother Collie was executed and Uncle Malamute was murdered. Things are also grim in THE LAST WHISPER IN THE DARK (Bantam, $26), which gets off to a sluggish start until Terry's mother's awful family takes over this boldly original sequel. A nephew makes "bloody, gory, hot, sweaty, scary" horror films, as well as a Web-based reality show starring Terry's 16-year-old sister, Airedale, as the leader of a gang of vandals and housebreakers. "It was a new age of grift that I just didn't understand," says Terry, who decides to take over the company and figure out how to run it in his own good time - and how perfect is that? In Lori Roy's crime novel, tiny tremors in the life of late 1950s Detroit warn of the cataclysms to come.
Library Journal Review
This beautifully complicated thriller, the first of a trilogy that is set primarily in Venice (both the real city and a perfect 3-D virtual re-creation), follows three protagonists as they investigate the murders of a woman dressed in priest's vestments and of another who had made a Freedom of Information request at a military base in Italy. Carabiniere captain Kat Tapo follows clues that lead first to a deserted island near Venice, once a cemetery and later the site of an asylum, where mysterious symbols match the tattoos found on the woman priest, and then to a website, Carnivia.com, where identities are hidden behind carnival masks. Holly Boland, a U.S. Army second lieutenant, unearths possible NATO involvement in illegal activities that stoked the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. And Daniele Barbo, a brilliant but mentally unsettled hacker, enters the world he created, impenetrably anonymous, in an attempt to save himself and help the two women as they face attempts to silence them forever. VERDICT A brilliant blend of fascinating story lines, serious issues, impeccable research, gripping intrigue, and engaging characters, Holt's debut is eminently satisfying from start to finish. Highly recommended for readers who enjoy intelligent thrillers (think Joseph Kanon). [See Prepub Alert, 12/13/12.]-Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
