"who locked up who?"
It is quite a short novel with each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character.
The first character is Luca, the 29 year old son of the book's mass murderer. Indeed, it start with the moment the local Carabinieri police arrive and arrest his father, after discovering a 22 year old girl in a metal container. He is ins shock and tries to make sense of how this person and his father could be the same person, and how he could be blind to it all. Eventually he heads off to the island where the box was found, on land owned by his father, to try and make sense of things. The question is whether his own obsessions – in particular, his fascination with the girl in the box – Laura, make him more like his father than he'd like to believe. What if he were trapped in the box?
"There is a loud bang and the lamp flickers. The container is being buffeted by gusts of wind. The clang that follows chills my blood as I understand what has happened: the vertical bar has dropped. Locking me in"
The second chapter brings us the story of Laura. We meet her falling out with her friend in the local park, just proper to her abduction. We get the terror, the fear, and then the psychological aftermath. Then, the release. The next Chapter is her mother's - her reunification with her mother. Eggshells. Is she ok? is she doing normal things? Is she faking it?
The final chapter brings another missing child, more distraught parents, more blame.
This is very much a psychological drama. A book where both Laura and Luca's oxygen has been taken away by Luca's father. A book where your sympathies change – especially with regards to Luca. I would personally have avoided some of the apparent future in the final chapter (it is called 'a hypothesis for the future' after all), but overall it was well-executed. So, hats off to the translation by Clarissa Botsford which flows smoothly and ensures the suffocating tension is retained.

On October 6, 2013, everything changed in the life of Luca Balestri with the arrest of his father, Professor Carlo Maria Balestri over the charge of abduction. Fourteen years previously, the eight-year-old Laura disappeared during the summer. She was nowhere to be found. When the police tracked her whereabouts, she has transformed into a twenty-two years old fine woman who integrates well into society, uses her iPhone seamlessly as though fourteen years of isolation inside a container did not surprise her about the advancement of internet technology. The story seems unbelievable to happen in real life, as this sounds like an unlikely social experiment.

Through his novel, Sacha Naspini provides a unique analysis of the nature of crimes, seen from the family of the criminal (in this case, Luca Balestri), as well as those of the victim (the mother of Laura and the childhood friend of Laura, Martina). The problem is that the reappearance of Laura after fourteen years has caused many disruptions to those people. Luca is forced to rewrite the narratives and the memories of his loving father who is a model professor in anthropology into some kind of psychopath. Laura’s mother who has found a new life with her new partner, Danielle, is suddenly forced to make a room for the now-adult Laura in her household.

There are many ways the present moment could change the past, by uncovering new facts that used to be censored. After learning the harsh fact of his father’s secret, Luca is forced to accept the fact that he is the son of a psychopath (and possibly a murderer too). There’s a lot of regret in his confession, as the date of Laura’s abduction coincidentally is also the day when Luca left for Elba to meet her summertime love, Angela, who turns out to have a new boyfriend there. One single instance changed everything in his life, and he was in turn being held prisoner by his father’s crime. He got obsessed with Laura, tailing her across Milan, stalking her on Facebook, and even went so far as to make appointments with Laura’s therapist.

I think this novel is a good illustration of the complexities of human nature, by taking it using an extreme case of abduction. When cases of abduction did not make it into the discovery of the victims and the criminals, it only becomes statistical data in a report compiled by local police authorities. But the discovery changes everything, as it exposes the individuals behind the crime. We can learn the minds of both the criminals and the victims, also how the crimes affected their lives from that. According to knoema.com, the kidnapping rate for Italy was 0.3 cases per 100,000 populations in 2018. This number is significantly lower when compared to Belgium whose rate was 10.3 cases per 100,000 populations. However, it has made me rethink again about the nature of crime and how the guilt is felt sometimes even by those people not directly associated with the crime (the family of both the criminals and the victims who are actually not responsible for the crime itself).

Professor Carlo Maria Balestri in this story follows the usual archetype of a mad scientist, who follows an unethical route to discover facts due to his unsettling personality traits. He leads a double life in this story, as illustrated by Luca’s description of his life from his teenage life into adulthood. Do geniuses tend to have something wrong with their brains? Dr Hannibal Lecter in the Hannibal series also follows this trajectory in his super-calm demeanour as he executed his victims. I forgot where did I read it, but there’s this nice description of how criminals see their victims as no different than a sheet of paper (maybe I read it in one of the Lecter series). To them, slitting the throat of their victims is no different from tearing a sheet of paper. But that maybe should be saved for further discussion.

'Are criminals capable of feeling affection?'
'Yes, they can.'

What happens when the person who raised you turns out to be a monster? On August 12, 1999 an eight-year-old girl, Laura, goes missing. Fourteen years later, long after all hope had been lost, she is found alive in a container truck. Luca is having dinner with his father, a well-respected anthropologist when the police raid their home and arrests the man. The charges against professor Carlo Maria Balestri are extremely serious--could the face of Evil itself hide behind the mask of a renowned academic?

This is a book that has not been publicised much so it was a small but powerful discovery for me, I think more people need to be aware of this book! This book is a descent into the darkness of those who suffer the consequences of trauma and how, at various levels, this will lead to different forms of processing.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

This is a tricky one to review.... its creepy at times,and unsettling, but it didn't really hold my attention.
I'd pick it up and put it down frequently.
I enjoyed the crime viewed from different perspectives,each adding a new layer to what we knew.
Just OK for me.