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The Abduction by Jonathan Holt

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burritapal_1's review

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adventurous dark informative tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Spoiler

For the 2nd book in the carnivia series, the book starts out with Holly calling Kat. If you remember, at the end of the last book, Holly and Kat had had a falling out. But this time Holly needs her help: the daughter of an officer on the U.S. base in Venice, Mia Elston, has disappeared, supposedly kidnapped.
On Carnivia.com, the cyber copy of Venice, where people can hide their identities behind masks, and interact, videos begin to show up showing Mia Talking about torture techniques that the CIA uses that are said by the U.S. government to not be tortuous. Then it shows men in hoods doing those things to Mia, while she screams. The kidnappers say that the torture of Mia will stop when further construction on the U.S. base are halted. Nobody in Venice wants the U.S. there.
" … the new American base being built at the disused Dal Molin airfield, just a few miles from the existing Garrison at Caserma Ederle, was one of the biggest building projects in northern Italy, matched only by the flood barriers in the Venetian lagoon. Both projects were controversial, but in the case of Dal Molin the controversy had quickly turned to something more .
Many local people had already been uneasy about the number of US military installations ringing their city, from underground missile silos to vehicle compounds. Others had been riled by the way the Americans appeared to have been able to bypass the usual planning procedures, their very presence sanctioned by secret agreements dating back to the 2nd World War..."
Because a skeleton had been found at the construction location by a protestor, that dated back to World War II, Lieutenant Aldo Piola had to question the workers from the job site. When he did this, he found that many of the workers had illegal Visas.
This was no surprise, The army bases utilizing foreign workers with visas that are forged, for the construction work to keep costs low.
"... Many of Italy's foreign workers were in the country illegally was hardly a revelation. He'd heard that these days you could get even get false papers from the mafia on easy credit coma with payment deferred until your 1st paypacket - the catch being that only then did the illegal worker discover that he was being charged an exorbitant rate of interest on top of the original amount, carefully worked out so that he'd never quite be able to pay off the debt."
The trouble was that the backhoe worker from where the skeleton was found had fled the country, fearing reprisal from the Mafia and for his presence illegally in the country. So, Piola was unable to question him.
Carabiniere Captain Kat Tapo and Holly Boland, U.S. Army 2nd lieutenant, ask Carnivia genius creator Daniele Barbo to help them find Mia.
This book got an extra star just because this author shows the disgusting hypocrisy of the CIA declaring that water boarding and walling, and others are not tortuous interrogation techniques, all the while describing Mia as going through those very Agonizing tortures. Moreover, Holly herself is later kidnapped, and is given even more extreme torture, although she is rescued before she is destroyed.
I also like how the author makes fun of the Catholic Church, especially the Order of Melchizedek. During his investigation, Piola goes to their headquarters, and inside the building finds pictures and explanations that are laughable:
"there was a picture of the previous Pope being welcomed to Palazzo Lighnier by a group of men in ceremonial robes, and another of a robed man proudly holding an elaborate golden urn. Just visible inside it, through a kind of porthole, was a lump of black matter.
'One of the order's most prized relics is the incorrupt tongue of Saint John the Baptist, presented to the Brethren by Pope Sixtus IV in 1477. The tongue, which spoke the original prophecy of Christ's arrival, is reputed to warn whenever the Catholic Church is in danger of heresy or misjudgment.'
If that was the case, piola thought cynically, it must have been babbling nonstop of late. …"

A lamentable issue I had with this author was his penchant for having his characters eat animals. You could have just had them having dinner and not told us what poor defenseless animals had been killed to fill a human character's mouth, ie, eels, pigeons, baby cows, the guts and organs of sheep etc. Kat dines with a rich old fart who wants to have sex with her on...
"... Live spider crabs during the all too brief season known as la muta 'the change' - during which the tiny crustaceans shed their shells in order to grow a larger one. Like most venetians, she [Kat's grandma] usually served this delicacy stuffed, with the unusual proviso that it was the crab, not the cook, which did the stuffing, the crabs having been placed in a bowl of batter mixture to gorge themselves for a few hours before being tipped into a Pan of hot oil."
And then, when Piola is in Rome during his investigation, he dines with An expert on World War II, on some disgusting Rome cuisine:
"then for the primo, it had to be meat, and specifically offal. Roman cooking had always been based on using odd cuts in interesting ways, Anna told him, a legacy of the days when there had been so many cardinals, nobles and courtiers in the city that all that was left to ordinary people was the quinto quarto, the 5th quarter - that is, the inside. He was intrigued to see on the menu dishes such as milza (stewed spleen), cervello (brain), coratella (fried heart, lung and aesophagus), and even Zinna (cow's udder); all hard to find elsewhere these days but clearly still devoured by Romans with gusto."

Holly Boland still seems to be trusting of that Ian Gilroy old fart character, supposedly eX CIA, who is very much still CIA. She trusts him with all her intelligence, much of it given by Kat, the Caribiniere Capitan. I think Aldo Piolo is getting an idea that he can't be trusted, because otherwise how would he know all that about where Piolo was planning to go, if he put in for a transfer from Venice.? I think Gilroy is putting bugs in his rooms and on his phone.
"She shook her head. 'that's paranoid.' it was true that Gilroy's name had cropped up from time to time. but it would be crazy to try to read too much into it. The truth, as she understood it, was more like a series of Russian dolls, one inside another. Inside Azione Dal Molin was Carver, and drugs, and Elston, and Exodus. Inside the CIA was Bob Garland, and OSS, and the Order of Melchizedek. And inside them both, the very smallest doll, was The Enemy - once called communism and now call terror, but the same all consuming foe nevertheless."