Contessa Olivia Brunamonti, the heroine of the story, is an American former supermodel, who some decades previously had married an Italian count with a famous name but not much money.
After Count Brunamonti's death, Olivia used a combination of her own former fame as an international supermodel, her husband's family name, and her skills in the fashion industry, to build a successful fashion house. The story begins when her children are grown and her daughter has followed in Olivia's footsteps by becoming a famous supermodel in her own right.
Unfortunately a bunch of criminals wrongly assume from the Contessa's famous name and the success of her business that she must be far more wealthy than is actually the case (Olivia's husband having left her far more in the way of debts than tangible assets.) So they target her family for kidnap. Striking in the dark and intending to grab the daughter, they accidentaly kidnap Olivia herself.
The first part of the book and further sections through the narrative provide a chilling account of the contessa's ordeal at the hands of the kidnappers, which is real enough to be quite frightening. The book also contains a detective story as Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia faces a race against time to rescue Olivia, and examines a number of issues including
* survival - how people in a dangerous situation react to maximise their chances of living through it
* Stockholm syndrome, e.g. how some prisoners come to sympathise with their captors, though the heroine of this story is no Patty Hearst
* how anti-kidnapping laws can penalise the victims (with reference to a law which freezes the assets of the family of kidnap victims to prevent them paying ransoms)
* family relationships: the contessa's son and daughter are bitterly divided about whether to go to the police when she is kidnapped, and there are other family issues which I won't explain in more detail to avoid spoiling the story.
This is one of a series of books featuring Marshal Guarnaccia. Not a cheerful read but a fairly powerful one.