Customer Reviews

Property of Blood

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Magdalen Nabb's detective (The Marshall) is based in Florence and nobody captures the dark side of that brilliantly lit town better than Nabb.

"Property of Blood" represents a change for Nabb in that great chunks of this book are written as if in the first person, by a woman who has been kidnapped. I couldn't help but ponder whether Nabb herself had spent time with victims of this all too common Italian crime: the accounts of the Italianized-American fasion maven's plight are chilling. Nabb really gets inside her soul.

The tale is a page turner despite the fact that there are some things the reader knows right from the start. Those who are familiar with Nabb's work will recognize the intricate misunderstandings that The Marshall encounters because he, as usual, fails to acknowledge his own gifts and the esteem in which he is held by his colleagues.

Here, too, we meet the family dynamic of the Marshall's own relatives contrasted with that of the victim's family in the characteristic manner that is so revealing of modern Italian life.

Nabb is amazing and this may be her best yet. If you haven't read the rest of this remarkable writer's work, you are in for a real treat of both character development (start at the beginning of The Marshall's career) and excellence of story crafting.

I read this book about a year ago when I checked it out at my local library, so pardon me if I don't remember all of the details correctly. The opening of the book describes in intense detail a harrowing kidnapping, from the point of view of the kidnappee. You won't be able to put it down until the character is safely?? at home--actually you won't be able to put it down until you discover what actually happened at home to bring about the horrendous crime. The detective in this series is funny but has less personality than other detectives I enjoy. However, the story--which is set in the world of fashion--makes up for any defects. Enjoy!

Contessa Olivia Brunamonti, the heroine of the story, is an American former supermodel, who some decades previously had married an Italian count with a famous name but not much money.

After Count Brunamonti's death, Olivia used a combination of her own former fame as an international supermodel, her husband's family name, and her skills in the fashion industry, to build a successful fashion house. The story begins when her children are grown and her daughter has followed in Olivia's footsteps by becoming a famous supermodel in her own right.

Unfortunately a bunch of criminals wrongly assume from the Contessa's famous name and the success of her business that she must be far more wealthy than is actually the case (Olivia's husband having left her far more in the way of debts than tangible assets.) So they target her family for kidnap. Striking in the dark and intending to grab the daughter, they accidentaly kidnap Olivia herself.

The first part of the book and further sections through the narrative provide a chilling account of the contessa's ordeal at the hands of the kidnappers, which is real enough to be quite frightening. The book also contains a detective story as Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia faces a race against time to rescue Olivia, and examines a number of issues including

* survival - how people in a dangerous situation react to maximise their chances of living through it

* Stockholm syndrome, e.g. how some prisoners come to sympathise with their captors, though the heroine of this story is no Patty Hearst

* how anti-kidnapping laws can penalise the victims (with reference to a law which freezes the assets of the family of kidnap victims to prevent them paying ransoms)

* family relationships: the contessa's son and daughter are bitterly divided about whether to go to the police when she is kidnapped, and there are other family issues which I won't explain in more detail to avoid spoiling the story.

This is one of a series of books featuring Marshal Guarnaccia. Not a cheerful read but a fairly powerful one.

The last two books (Monster of Florence and Property of Blood) by Magdalen Nabb are the definitely the best in the whole series. This may be because both are based on real stories and the facts behind them are real and therefore more rational that some of her previous stories. Whereas the first nine books are from the 'mind' of Nabb, the last two are roman a clef. When Nabb passed away a few years ago, she was treated especially well by the Italian Carabinieri, who considered her like an honorary member. They treated her this way because of the sympathetic way she wrote about Marshal Guarnaccia and showed how the Carabinieri are placed in awkward positions by the government and justice system. In Italy the Carabinieri are usually presented as buffoons and the successor to the Keystone Kops.

This book 'feels' as if Nabb had been able to read from so of the kidnapping cases from around the Florence area. If not then she had the most amazing imagination, but so much of the dialog from the kidnapped woman reads like the result of an interrogation that I suspect it was taken down verbatim. The play-by-play among the family members, I think is all Nabb and strengthens the novel immeasurably. If the basic story is the skeleton she took from the Carabineri archives, she is the 'forensic scientist' who put meat on the bones.

I regret that considering how good the last two books have been that there are only three more books to the series.

Zeb Kantrowitz