It’s a Mystery: “Love doesn’t visit often, even when it comes, it can always change its mind and walk away”
/American Blood
Sometimes at night he lay awake and thought of his dead. Sins of others but they still robbed his sleep. That boy they’d left in South Brooklyn. That blown tail job in Koreatown. …Sins of others but he’d still borne witness. Complicit. They were still his dead. He thought of it as the night brigade. Misdeeds paraded for his musing.
His quest for the missing Ray pits him against a vicious crew of killers, and members of a drug ring who almost surely know her whereabouts. In this tightly wound, complex maze of a plot Marshall confronts a dizzying array of villains. With a large nod to Jack Reacher and Travis McGee, he plunges into a cops-and-robbers shootout and emerges standing. He rescues a damsel in distress who is actually a fairly tough cop with hidden dimensions. In fact, Sanders has created a panoply of colorful characters with dialogue that, to paraphrase one critic, would bring a smile to Elmore Leonard’s face.American Blood is a marvel of a novel with a wow finish which, when it unmasks Patriarch, pulls all the pieces of the plot’s puzzle together with stunning clarity. Ben Sanders is more than a comer, he’s a winner.As he proved with the first two novels in his Carnivia trilogy, The Abomination (2013) and The Abduction (2014), Jonathan Holt knows a thing or two or three about starting off with a bang and never letting up. The Absolution is the smashing conclusion to this masterful trio.
I do most solemnly promise and swear, without the least equivocation, mental reservation, or self-evasion of mind whatsoever, binding myself under no less penalty than to have my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the roots, and my body buried in the rough sands of the sea at low watermark, where the tide ebbs and flows twice in twenty-four hours, never to divulge the secrets I shall learn amongst this brotherhood.
Since Kat is well aware that as a woman she cannot penetrate the closed world of Italian freemasonry, she suspects this assignment must have darker implications. For one thing, she learns that Cassandre was engaged in some very illegal banking transactions. Even more interesting, the liabilities incurred by Cassandre are being covered by one of Italy’s richest men, Count Tignelli, a man who is as corrupt as he is influential. And when it comes to Venice’s most powerful citizens, money isn’t the only motive for murder.Meanwhile, Kat’s friend, American intelligence analyst Holly Boland, is back in Italy. She’s found a document among her father’s possessions that confirms evidence of a certain Operation Gladio, a shocking Cold War cover-up Holly first encountered in The Abomination. To corroborate this, she seeks out her father’s old friend and her mentor, Ian Gilroy. Now seventy-two and long retired from his job as chief of the CIA’s Venice Section, he’s anything but out of the game. He more than hints at some ongoing conspiracies with heavy U.S. involvement, thus confirming the saying that there’s no such thing as a retired spy:
“NATO, Military Intelligence, CIA – during the Cold War, we were all part of the same chess game. But that didn’t stop NATO from running its own, sometimes ill-advised sideshows…. Like Operation Gladio…NATO’s own covert military network in Italy…. Over a dozen assassinations, bombings and other atrocities were laid at Gladio’s door…. the point is Gladio was NATO’s responsibility. The CIA knew nothing about it. At least not officially…
Of course pivotal to all this is Daniele Barbo, the compulsively fascinating creator of the encrypted website Carnivia.com, the virtual counterpart to the modern physical world. Barbo, kidnapped and horribly disfigured as a child, has survived to become a force majeure in the underbelly of the internet. Now he makes the chilling discovery that his website has been contaminated by a malevolent virus that will cripple Italy unless he can break his own encryption and prevent catastrophe.Finally, leading up to a ripped-from-the-headlines finale:
Holly found allegations that Italy was being specifically targeted by the NSA as a base for cyber-surveillance, with more secret listening stations than any other European country…VIGILANCE, she read, the Virtual Intelligence Gathering Alliance, was America’s answer to the Snowden revelations. Instead of spying covertly on friendly nations, America was now inviting them to opt in to a massive “Golden Shield” covering the whole of the Western World.
As the three cases merge, a conspiracy dating back decades emerges that involves the security services, the Church and the CIA. As Jonathan Holt said in a recent interview: “My scenario of a terrorist cyberattack unleashed from a ‘bot army’ of hacked computers is well within the realm of possibility.” After you’ve read The Absolution, let your imagination run wild with that thought for a while.
