MILO'S RECKONING

In 1994, a grad student investigates his mentor’s alleged suicide.

New York University Ph.D. candidate Milo Rossi owes his love of Italian literature and nascent academic career to Lenny D’Ambrosio, a kindly professor who has been guiding his studies for years. One night, after Milo attends a dinner party at Lenny’s Mamaroneck apartment, Lenny drops him at the train station and asks him to phone tomorrow, saying there’s something they need to discuss. Early the next morning, however, Milo receives a call from Detective Delzio of the Harrison PD: Lenny’s downstairs neighbor heard a commotion near dawn and went upstairs to find the door unlocked and Lenny’s corpse hanging from the rafter by a bedsheet. The police rule the death a suicide, but Milo isn’t convinced and starts digging, armed with details divulged by Delzio. To Milo’s shock, the “pathologically private” Lenny had an extensive VHS collection of sadomasochistic porn filmed in Italy, featuring indigent people and refugees. According to Delzio, Lenny’s supplier was none other than Valentino Cipolla, older brother of Matteo Cipolla, Milo’s late brother Carlo’s best friend. When Milo’s mother reveals that she’d found a videotape mailed from Italy among Carlo’s effects when he died six years ago, Milo tracks down and interrogates Val, whose answers only lead to more questions. Olshan’s latest explores the difficulties of truly knowing another person, be it a friend, lover, relative, or icon, as well as the pitfalls of uncovering the secrets of someone you respect and admire. The author writes fondly and colorfully of Italy, its culture, and its people, but this Italophilia conspires with discursive prose to create the air of a novel inexpertly translated. The convoluted central mystery disappoints, comprising little more than a string of increasingly improbable coincidences.

An introspective tale that regrettably fails as crime fiction.