Blood on the Altar

De: Tobias Jones

Narrado por: Leighton Pugh

One Sunday morning in 1993 a 16-year-old girl named Eliza Claps goes missing from a church in the centre of Potenza, Italy. Shortly before her disappearance, Elisa had met Danilo Restivo, a strange local boy with a fetish for cutting women's hair on the back of buses.

Elisa's family are convinced that Resitvo is responsible for their daughter's disappearance, but he is protected by local bigwigs: by his Sicilian father, by a doctor with links to organised crime, by a priest who had vices of his own. Years go by, and Elisa's family can find only false leads.

2002, and Restivo is now living in Bournemouth.

In November that year, his neighbour is found murdered, with strands of her own hair in her hands. Once again the police are at a loss to pin anything on him. It's not until 2010, when Elisa's decomposed body is found in the church where she went missing, that the two cases are linked and Restivo is finally dealt with.

Blood on the Altar combines a gripping true crime case with Jones' deep understanding of Italian culture - the impunity it offers to the powerful - he so expertly demonstrated in his best seller The Dark Heart of Italy.

©2019 Tobias Jones (P)2019 Audible, Ltd

Less true crime and more tourist guide

This would be a better book if it focused more on the story but the writer will side track to giving a detailed history of the various little towns and they offer no substance to the real story that gets buried beneath the unneeded rambling