Blog Tour! The Extremist by Nadia Dalbuono Blog Tour!

This is the fourth book in Nadia Dalbuono’s Detective Leone Scamarcio thrillers, and I’ve been lucky enough to have read and reviewed them all. This means that I’ve seen Leone Scamarcio grow as a character, and have followed his story arch throughout the series. While this undoubtedly heightens my enjoyment of the series, each book is a self-contained story in its own right, and unlike some series, you don’t have to have read the previous outings to enjoy each book. 

The Extremist begins with coordinated jihadi attacks on the streets of Rome: gunmen storm a McDonalds, a school, a coffee bar near the coliseum, taking hostages at each location.  Leone Scamarcio works in the Rome Flying Squad, nothing to do with terrorism. So it’s a shock to him and his colleagues, all gathered around the television watching the horrific events unfold, when a phone call comes in to say that the hostage takers have demanded to talk to him and him alone.

Scamarcio is whisked to the scene of the coffee shop where he’s hustled inside. There a young terrorist, Ifran, demands he travel to a villa in a town thirty kilometres outside of Rome, go to the end of the back garden and dig up a box. He’s then to bring the contents of the box back to Ifran. Oh, and have a CNN film crew in tow to witness the handover of the contents which can be beamed to the world.

This is an intriguing premise and sets up the rest of the novel. Scamarcio is suspicious of the Italian intelligence agencies for reasons made clear in the previous novels. The reader of The Extremist doesn’t need to know the specific reasons for this, but it is made clear that it’s due to previous cases he’s worked on. The Intelligence agencies are crawling all over the scene and he decides to go it alone.  What follows is a pursuit thriller where Scamarcio tries to find out what’s in the box, why Ifran wanted him in particular to bring it to him, all the while evading the police, the Carabinieri and the intelligence agencies who’ve listed him as wanted.

A criticism of this novel might be that’s it’s unrealistic that Scamarcio would go it alone, that it would have been easier for him to alert his superiors to what Ifran wanted, that they could have collected the box. Perhaps the siege could have been brought to a close, special forces dressing as a CNN film crew and launching  a raid to rescue the hostages. This criticism would be valid and to be sure that’s how things would probably play out in real life. But Nadia Dalbuono writes very Italian thrillers, where conspiracies are around every corner. Her previous books have tackled the infiltration of Italian society by organised crime - the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra, the ‘Ndrangheta; Operation Gladio, the stay behind armies set up by the CIA in the case of a Soviet invasion which soon morphed into far right terror; VIP child sex rings and more.

Like its predecessors, The Extremist tackles big subjects. There are innumerable thrillers which deal with terror attacks, but without giving away spoilers, this book is more than that, a conspiracy thriller which dares to ask big questions. It’s one of the reasons that I’m such a fan of Dalbuono’s work, her books are head and shoulders above the usual run of the mill police procedurals. They dare to look beyond the headlines and question what we take for granted. While I’m not a conspiracy theorist myself, to be sure the theories she posits in her thrillers all have a kernel of truth. There really was an Operation Gladio ( a central theme in her novel The American), Italian organised crime really is a pernicious influence on Italian politics and society, while VIP child sex rings have been investigated in a number of countries. The conspiracy at the heart of The Extremist has a similar basis in fact, whether or not it really has the influence portrayed here.

So would I recommend The Extremist? Yes, absolutely. While it’s not strictly necessary, I would also recommend readers get hold of copies of the earlier books in the series. They won’t be disappointed.

5 out of 5 stars