‘Whatever It Takes’ by Rachel Abbott

Published by Black Dot Publishing,
11 March 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-99994376-9  (PB)

Detectives in fiction often have complicated personal lives, but DCI Tom Douglas takes complicated to a whole new level. His techno-wizard brother Jack has links with organized crime, adopted a child who was kidnapped and abused, has faked his own death, reappeared with a new identity, disappeared again... you get the picture. He uses his considerable tech skills to stay in touch under the radar – but now Tom himself is on sick leave, recovering from a serious gunshot wound sustained in the line of duty, there hasn’t been a whisper from Jack.

The obvious conclusion is that he and his family are on the run again – and Jack is adept at leaving a trail of clues which only Tom can interpret. It leads to Venice, where most of the action takes place. Jack’s adopted daughter has been kidnapped again, this time with Mafia involvement, and to secure her release Jack has to facilitate a serious crime, for which he needs Tom’s help. And that goes against every principle Tom holds dear.

Abbott makes good use of first career in IT to build Jack Douglas’s expertise with the kind of intriguing detail her books have become famous for. From an apparently impregnable door which magically opens at Tom’s touch to a fictitious conversation generated by AI from a few spoken words via super-secure communications systems and undetectable spyware, Jack’s skills seem like something from Star Trek to us mere mortals.

She is clearly very familiar indeed with Venice, its twisty lanes and alleys as well as the glamorous side the tourists see. Seedy bedsitters spring to life as vividly as opulent palazzos and luxurious hotels. And while Tom tries to be invisible in Italy, his long-term sidekick Becky Robinson, now acting DCI in his absence, and his abrasive but supportive boss Philippa Stanley are picking up the pieces Jack dropped back in the UK before going in search of his missing daughter. 

Scratch-them-and-they-bleed characters are a given in any Rachel Abbott novel, especially the women and the bad guys. Elena Ferraro, AKA Tia Rukavina, treads a very fine line between the two; sophisticated, brilliant and beautiful, she has an agenda all her own. Then there’s wannabe Mafioso and volatile loose cannon Renzo Moretti, and assorted Bulgarians with an eye to the main chance. And many more besides, all with quirks and details that make them memorable.

Like all Rachel Abbott’s novels, Whatever It Takes is well plotted, beautifully written and a page-turner which will keep you reading till the small hours. She has already taken these characters on a few roller-coaster rides through more than a dozen novels. This time the surprise ending will leave you wondering where she plans to them take next.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Rachel Abbott was born just outside Manchester, England.   She became a systems analyst at the age of 21 in the early 1970s and formed her own software company in the mid-1980s designing computer programmes for education.   The company expanded into all forms of interactive media and became extremely successful. The sale of the company in 2000 enabled her to take early retirement and fulfil one of her lifelong ambitions - to buy and restore a property in Italy.  Once there she completely restored a ruined monastery and started a second successful business renting it out for weddings and conferences. In 2010 she embarked on her third career and wrote her first book Only the Innocent. She has now written fourteen books. 

www.rachel-abbott.com/ 

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.