Red Fox - 2000

Random House, 2000. Used. RED FOX is set in Italy, but no ROMAN HOLIDAY with Audrey Hepburn here. Geoffrey Harrison, a young executive on a posting to Rome for the British firm International Chemical Holdings (ICH), is kidnapped and held for $2 million ransom by a crime ring that specializes in such extortions. Franca Tantardina is the leader of a cell of the socialist Nuclei Armati Proletaria (NAP), which specializes in violent attacks on the Italian "establishment". One of Franca's group, Giancarlo, is a 19 year-old novice. He's also Franca's current sexual toy-boy, one in a long succession that she casually uses and discards. But Giancarlo, silly lad, is besotted. So, when Franca is captured by the state's antiterrorist unit, Giancarlo hatches a plot to single-handedly free the woman that deflowered him and win her undying love; he'll snatch Harrison from the kidnappers and exchange him for Franca, or execute him. Rather than creating Fictional superheroes, Seymour conjures ordinary folks playing life-or-death roles in larger conflicts. His novels' characters are eminently believable, and this, for me, is the author's chief appeal. (And which is why I have a half-dozen of his books lined up on the shelf to read.) RED FOX is no different in this regard. My only quarrel with this storyline is that the reader's sympathetic support is too fragmented between several protagonists. Should one cheer on the truly hapless Harrison, or Giuseppi Carboni, the Roman cop on the original kidnapping case, or Francesco Vellosi, the powerful head of the government's Public Security agency, or Archie Carpenter, a Scotland Yard inspector now working security for ICH, who's dispatched to Rome to liaison with the locals? It certainly isn't Violet Harrison, Geoffrey's spouse, who has a lot in common with Franca