The Abomination

Set in present-day Venice, this is the opening volume of a thriller trilogy that follows Captain Katerina Tapo, a newly assigned investigator who has never led a murder inquiry. The novel moves through the city's festival season and across a web of secrets involving the Catholic Church, American intelligence, and a shadowy conspiracy.

On the night of La Befana, when Venice is crowded with masked revelers, fireworks, and wine-fueled talk, a body surfaces from the Grand Canal. The dead woman has been dressed in a priest's vestments, a sacrilege locals call the Abomination. Kat's search takes her through the narrow lanes of the city, to an empty asylum on the deserted island of Poveglia, to Carnivia.com, a locked-down gossip site that holds Venice's private scandals, to an old monastery, and at last to a United States military base.

Kat works alongside two unlikely partners. Lieutenant Holly Boland is a young American army intelligence officer whose personal connection to Italy gives her a particular stake in the case. Daniele Barbo, a withdrawn Venetian nobleman who turned to hacking, runs Carnivia.com and guards it closely. Just as the investigation gains ground, the leads dry up, evidence disappears, and Kat is told to drop the case.

As the pieces fall together, the inquiry exposes a dangerous conspiracy with roots in post-Cold War Italy, one that forces Kat to question whom she can trust. The story's central idea is that crimes left unpunished in the past do not stay buried, and that corrupt powers tend to repeat their wrongdoing.