Tobias Jones

This is a book written and published about the last time I visited northern Italy and Florence (2004) and journalistically covers an era in which I intermittently lived and loved there (1976-2003). I wanted to read, in retrospect, what was reported, thru Tobias Jones' English, younger, naïve, and rather successful, eyes. Also this reportage and travel book comes from the perspective of a British male in love with an Italian (whom he has married and has 3 children), soccer, and Italy. This work is written with a rather Leftist, utopian bent missing the knowledge and lacking the understanding of the courtly, Latin history and traditions, which seems so opaque to the democratic Anglo-Saxon culture.… (more)

Blood on the Altar, on its surface a detailed account of the disappearance of 16-year-old Elisa Claps on September 12, 1993, in Potenza, in southern Italy, is equal parts cultural critique and true crime expose. The investigation that ensues upon Elisa's failure to return home on that fateful Sunday morning is astoundingly shoddy. Advancing at a glacial pace and impeded at every turn by officials who seem to have something to hide, it stumbles and sputters as it encounters one roadblock after another. Various theories, both plausible and absurd, are brought forward to explain Elisa's disappearance, but the family is convinced the person to blame is Danilo Restivo, a young man several years older than Elisa who was supposed to meet her that morning and by all accounts was the last person to see her alive. Restivo, an oddball loner with a hair fetish, has no reasonable explanation for what happened after he claims to have left Elisa, and yet to the Claps family's astonishment and frustration Restivo is coddled and protected by those in positions of power, and never fully called upon to account for the crime they are sure he committed. Years pass and Elisa remains missing, though it seems there is a false sighting or bogus lead every other day. The Claps family's agonies do not diminish. Then the scene shifts to Bournemouth, in Dorset, England, where Restivo has moved and where Heather Barnett, a mother of two and Restivo's neighbour, is brutally murdered. Tobias Jones, author of The Dark Heart of Italy, is as much an expert on Italy as any outsider can be and has written a riveting story of a criminal cover up and justice denied.… (more)