The Absolution

Starred review from October 19, 2015
British author Holt’s masterly sequel to 2014’s The Abduction concludes his Carnivia trilogy with a bang. Italian banker Alessandro Cassandre, whose unusual portfolio consisted of sophisticated credit default swaps and tax planning for charitable institutions, has been murdered in a manner suggesting Masonic ritual. The case falls to Venetian carabiniere Kat Tapo, who soon finds that her probing into the financier’s affiliations isn’t universally welcomed by her government colleagues. Meanwhile, Kat’s close American friend, 2nd Lt. Holly Bolland, is determined to learn whether her father’s connection with a notorious U.S. covert spy operation in Italy was the cause of his sudden illness. And genius Daniele Barbo, creator of the website Carnivia, who survived being kidnapped as a child in Italy, is preparing to relinquish his interest in Carnivia. Holt manages to make the risks posed by the growing movement toward smart devices intelligible and chilling, bringing all the pieces together plausibly and enabling newcomers to immediately identify with the multifaceted leads. Agent: Caradoc King, A.P. Watt (U.K.).

September 1, 2015

In the final book of Holt's "Carnivia" trilogy (after The Abomination and The Abduction), Venetian carabiniere Capt. Kat Tapo is assigned a major homicide investigation--the ritual Masonic execution of a banker found on Venice's Lido beach, with his throat cut, tongue pulled out, and a "hoodwink" mask over his eyes. Tech wizard Daniele Barbo, creator of the highly encrypted virtual world Carnivia, prepares to hand it off to its anonymous followers--until he learns that the site will be used to facilitate a terrorist attack that may well destroy Venice, cripple Italy, and lead to worldwide devastation. Meanwhile, Second Lt. Holly Boland has stumbled upon a Cold War conspiracy in her father's papers. In time, the three story lines connect, their roots anchored in the CIA's long-running interference in the fate of Italy. VERDICT Intriguing from start to finish, Holt's nicely orchestrated plot--complex but never confusing--is a tremendous achievement, integrating numbers and mathematical problems, virtual worlds, hackers, worms, the Internet of Things, CIA infiltration of Italian left- and right-wing terrorists, Masonic rituals, Italian postwar coups/scandals/corruption, the vast U.S. military installations in Italy, and, not least of all, Venetian cooking! These elements, along with fascinating characters and locales, add up to a great read that both instructs and entertains.--Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2015
In the final book of the Carnivia Trilogy, named after the anonymous virtual world created by disfigured genius Daniele Barbo, American intelligence analyst Holly Boland and Italian cop Kat Tapo reunite to investigate dark government conspiracies. Heading up her first murder case, in which the body of a Catholic bank executive is discovered on the shore of Lido Beach with his severed tongue placed next to his head and a weird mask placed on his face, Kat concludes the victim was subjected to a ritualistic Masonic punishment. Having stumbled on the possibility that someone caused the stroke suffered by her now-uncommunicative father, Holly has reason to probe the secret society as well. A former Army major, her old man had discovered that in the 1990s, hiding under the cover of Masonic fraternities, a clandestine NATO operation had trained a secret army of Italian civilians to fight a possible communist invasion. What the major doesn't know is that the CIA had infiltrated this network and was using small groups inside it to carry out its own politically motivated violent acts. And the Vatican was connected to these schemes as well. Meanwhile, Tareq, a brilliant, alienated young hacker of Libyan origins, takes the jihadi fight to the Internet. Barbo must find a way to stop Tareq from poisoning his website. Carnivia, the ingenuity and charm of which lent distinction to the first book in the trilogy, is less visible in the finale. But Holt's storytelling is much tighter and more controlled, and the characters are more believable. In spite of a few scenes that stop the novel in its tracks by explaining complicated details about banking and computer viruses through dialogue, Holt's finale has more than enough rapid-pulse action]and compelling insight into Italy-U.S. relations]to keep the pages turning.

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December 1, 2015
When a body wearing Masonic ritual garb washes ashore in Venice, Carabinieri Captain Kat Tapo's investigation exposes dangerous ties between Cold War politics, modern cyberterrorism, and Venetian secessionists. The victim isn't claimed by any of Venice's official Masonic lodges, which leaves only the purist underground sects. Kat and her prosecutor boyfriend, Flavio, are turning the investigation toward a politically influential count when Kat's friend, U.S. Army investigator Holly Boland, returns to Italy to uncover secrets from her father's Cold Warera military-intelligence service. In a long-buried confidential memo, Major Boland warned superiors that an Italian paramilitary group remained active underground instead of disbanding, per NATO orders. Meanwhile, computer genius Daniele Barbo, Holly's ex-boyfriend, is pulled into danger when a hacker uses cloaking code from Barbo's virtual-reality world, Carnivia, to launch a catastrophic cyberterrorism attack. Holt unites these seemingly disparate plots with an interesting history of America's overlooked political intervention in Italy for an exciting, albeit sometimes credulity-straining, conclusion to the Carnivia trilogy, which makes a nice read-alike for followers of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)