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The Abomination

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LoveReading Says

LoveReading Says

The opening volume of the Carnivia Trilogy is a fascinating story which blends an intriguing Dan Brown-like conspiracy mystery, Venice-set crime procedural tropes with a splendidly-drawn Italian female investigator who is paired up with a butch American Army sleuth and a fascinating cyber world and its eccentric but resolute inventor. The uncommon mix works most effectively and leaves so many avenues to explore in later volumes.

 

Sarah Broadhurst's view...

Put Donna Leon, Dan Brown and Steig Larsson in a blender and the result is Jonathan Holt. Fast moving, short paragraphs and so much information you think you know it all until something else comes into play. You’ve red herrings all the way through and then suddenly they tie up, only, of course, the whole thing doesn’t for this is the start of a trilogy. With three threads of narrative and a great female side-kick fighting for her rights, this mixed the church, NATO, arms manufacturers and the mafia together with a private army, shady folk in the US government, the unrest in the former Yugoslavia and a great web site. It is terrific. Highly recommended.

 

reader reviews

In addition to our Lovereading expert opinion for The Abomination a small number of Lovereading members were lucky enough to be invited to review this title - 'AWESOME, AWESOME, AWESOME!!Is the only way I can describe this book!...It had me completely gripped till the early hours before sleep forced me to stop reading.' – Sam Lewis. Scroll down to read more reviews.

 

Click here to visit the Carnivia.com website.

 

A piece from Jonathan Holt on how he came to write The Abomination...
'I always dreamed of writing a book that everyone would read. Sometimes I thought that meant writing a thriller: sometimes it drew me towards more character-based stories. Over a period of about five years I kept trying ideas and plots out, only to abandon them because they felt too small and unambitious.

Eventually I managed to have an entire novel almost finished - but something about it still felt wrong. Then one night I dreamt that I burnt it - or at least, the twenty-first century equivalent: I dreamed I deliberately deleted every single copy from my computer. In the dream, it felt strangely liberating… so I decided to do it. I put almost five year's work into my Recycle Bin and pressed 'permanently delete.' 'Are you sure?' asked the computer. Of course I wasn't sure! But afterwards I knew I'd made the right decision.' Click here to read the full comment.

A Piece of Passion from the Publisher on The Abomination...

'The Abomination plunged me into its world straight away. I was hooked from the very first page, where a murdered woman is washed up onto the steps of an ancient Venice church at midnight. She is found half-in, half-out of the freezing water, and she is wearing the robes of a priest – something that is totally forbidden by the Catholic church.

That was such a chilling, arresting opening scene, I didn’t think it could be bettered. But Jonathan Holt’s choice of locations just got more and more intriguing. By the time I had journeyed with his characters to an abandoned lunatic asylum on an uninhabited island, and then to Carnivia.com, an online simulation of Venice (an exact replica down to the cracks in the paving stones) where users are masked and secrets can be shared in absolute anonymity, I was already getting the tingling feeling you get with a really exciting submission. Before long, what had started as a relatively straightforward murder mystery turned into the unravelling of a deep, dark conspiracy with its roots in the Balkan war - a conspiracy so disturbingly plausible that the first thing I did when I closed the book was start looking for more information on google – and then I wrote an email to my colleagues saying “We HAVE to buy this book.”

- Laura Palmer, Fiction Publisher. Click here to read the full comment.

Maxim Jakubowski

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