A Private Venus by Giorgio Scerbanenco

Published in Italy in 1966; published in translation by Random House/Modern Library on October 13, 2026

Duca Lamberti was a physician until he was convicted of giving a fatal injection to a patient who begged him to let her die. Whether he engaged in euthanasia or administered an accidental overdose of a pain reliever to a woman who was dying of cancer is a bit ambiguous until the story's end, but the jury found him guilty of murder. Duca served a short prison term and is looking for work when the novel begins.

Pietro Auseri hires Duca to help his alcoholic son. Davide is 22, “a big lump” (in Pietro’s words) who never applied himself in school. He gets drunk before skipping lunch, falls asleep, gets drunk again in the afternoon, sleeps again, eats some of his dinner and falls asleep before he finishes. Pietro could send him to a detox clinic, “but when he comes out he’ll only start drinking again: as soon as he’s alone he starts drinking.”

Pietro thinks his son needs friends. He wants to “put him together with someone who could be both a friend and a doctor, who’d use any method he wanted to, to make him stop drinking . . . . I don’t care if it takes a year, or what means he uses, he could even beat him to death, I’d rather he was dead than an alcoholic.” Tough love, I suppose.

Duca needs money so he takes the job. To succeed, he thinks he needs to get to the psychological cause of Davide’s drinking. As he weans Davide off the hard stuff, he learns that Davide blames himself for a woman’s death.

The woman, Alberta Radelli, asked Davide for a ride, then offered sex for money. Davide gladly accepted, services were performed (twice), and then Alberta made a desperate request: ““If you take me away with you, for at least three months, a long way from here, and spend every minute with me, then tomorrow I won’t have to kill myself anymore.” She promises to end her life if he refuses.

Davide thinks he’s being scammed and, like any rational man, tells Alberta he can’t just disappear for three months (although, as Davide doesn’t have a girlfriend or a real job, this is a lie). Davide starts drinking when, a few days later, he reads in the news that Alberta's body was discovered in the woods. Her wrists were slashed, although the news fails to report that the police failed to find a sharp object near her body.

Duca begins to suspect there is more to the story when he learns that the woman dropped a mysterious object in Davide’s car. He recognizes the object as a roll of film from a spy camera. Duca’s father was a cop, so Duca visits a friend of his father who still works for the police. The friend has the film developed and discovers 25 pictures Alberta and 25 of another woman. The women are naked and in salacious poses.

The story follows Duca as he tries to learn how the photographs are connected to Alberta’s death. He tracks down Alberta’s sister, discovers the names of Alberta’s friends, and interviews Livia Ussaro, who turns out to be a supporter of euthanasia and a fan of his. She tells him about Alberta’s schemes to make money, and goes on from there. The mission becomes personal when he suspects Mafia involvement, as Duca’s father made it his mission to combat the Mafia until he was stabbed and transferred to a desk job.

Who killed Alberta and why? The answer to the mystery is plausible, or at least it seemed so to me. I don’t know much about life in Milan in the 1960s, but Giorgio Scerbanenco probably did and he convinced me that the criminals Duca meets were credible characters. Duca’s scheme to flush out the killers adds tension to an engaging story, as does Livia's endurance of torture after she becomes the bait in a trap to find Alberta's killer.

Duca is the sort of antihero who brings an ideal noir personality to the story. Scerbanenco offers no debate about the merits of mercy killing (that would probably not have been a winnable debate in 1966 Italy), but Duca gains sympathy by serving time for relieving a dying woman of her suffering.

Scerbanenco creates a strong sense of atmosphere by exploring the dark side of Milan. The city is known as the center of Italy’s fashion industry, but in the city’s dark corners and clubs, “women of easy virtue” are controlled by pimps with drugs, false promises, and violence. The novel isn't for cozy mystery fans.

A Private Venus is the first novel in the Milano quartet. Scerbanenco is celebrated as the author who created Italian noir. Noir and a country known for organized crime are an obvious fit. Fans of noir, mysteries, and Italian culture are all likely to enjoy Scerbanenco’s groundbreaking novel.

RECOMMENDED

Wither by Dan Warner

Published by Bloomsbury on September 29, 2026

Robot apocalypse stories are becoming more relevant as the masters of AI admit their creations might destroy us all. The risk that we will design technological intelligence capable of killing us has been known to science fiction fans for decades but advances in that technology have recently made those stories seem prophetic.

Wither is not about robots and it is only ambiguously about an apocalypse. The novel tells a more personal story about a man who helps empower AI and runs away from consequences that he can’t abide.

Wither is told in chapters that alternate between “Now” and “Then.” In the “Now” chapters, we discover that Mick has been living in the woods for a year. He talks to a friend named Bishop, but Bish isn’t with him. Mick left Bish behind, as he left Alison, the woman he loves. Mick feels guilty about abandoning his friends, but the early chapters hint that he is tormented by harming a woman named Rosalyn.

In the “Then” chapters, we learn that a man named Logan “plucked Mick from the pool of entry-level data analysts back in Chicago, saw potential, and made Mick part of something bigger.” Logan is trying to update a “dinosaur corporation” called Fourword, Inc. which has something to do with logistics and supply chains.

Mick is into predictive analysis and Fourword has access to massive amounts of data, particularly in the gas station retail industry. Mick’s job is to draw conclusions from the data, linking consumer preferences to psychological and cultural factors, weather, social media use, bathroom habits, and any other bit of information he can get his hands on. All to sell more granola bars to consumers who probably don’t like them.

Predicting and shaping consumer behavior requires a ton of data, so Logan offers Mick access to an AI based on quantum computing called Regression. Regression is supposed to be “the sum of all knowledge,” although how it works is “murky.” Mick will be one of a couple dozen beta testers, a fact that becomes important by the story’s end.

Mick decides to test Regression on gas station customers in Bloom, Missouri. He will install cameras and microphones to help Regression learn everything possible about customers as they buy or reject gas station goods. “An AI model watching everyone at once, identifying each shopper as they walk in the door, armed with all of their personal data.” Mick assures Logan that this is not mass surveillance but is limited, temporary AI training. Sure it is.

From each customer, Regression will create a Digital Twin, then scour social media and other sources to learn everything there is to know about the human Twin. Digital Twins are “virtual clones of real customers that simulated their characteristics, psychology, behavior, constellated from ten thousand data points.” With enough Twins, Regression will be able to predict consumer behavior on a grand scale.

Against that setup, Now and Then slowly merge. We learn that Mick left Bloom when something happened to his neighbor Rosalyn for which he (correctly) holds himself accountable. When Mick decides it is time to return to Bloom, we learn that nearly everyone has disappeared, leaving behind homes and evidence that residents fled quickly. How and why this happened is sort of revealed in the final Then chapters, although there is a good bit of ambiguity about exactly what happened. Suffice it to say that digital twins can be a bit spooky.

Mick’s return to Bloom sets up a confrontation with Regression and a digital twin — in his basement, of course, the room in which computer nerds stereotypically dwell. The reader will wonder whether Mick will find Alison or the real Bish. I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s fair to say that Dan Warner had a direction in mind that the reader might not anticipate (or appreciate).

Wither is timely in its exploration of AI’s insatiable thirst for data. In his more optimistic moments, Mick tells Alison that data and AI are the planet’s salvation. “Everyone, everything quantified, marked on the digital map. Let the algorithms find solutions. A new Age of Reason. Enlightenment 2.0. That’s our only hope.” Mick has reason to believe otherwise by the novel’s end.

Wither is more intelligent than a typical robot apocalypse story. I was frustrated by what struck me as an unfinished ending — Dan Warner raises a good many questions that are never answered — and I never fully warmed to Mick as a character, despite his eventual recognition that his embrace of Regression was naïve.

Character development is typical of genre fiction — adequate but unimpressive. The story is less than compelling but it never bored me. While Wither isn’t an encyclopedic exploration of the risks posed by AI, it at least calls attention to one of the most urgent questions that confront civilization.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Strangers by Naomi Alderman

Published by Little, Brown and Company on September 22, 2026

Like Naomi Alderman, the protagonist of The Strangers writes novels, television shows, and video games. She’s working on her new book, “the strangest thing I’d ever written, a cross between a novel and a memoir.” So much of The Strangers is an internal monolog that a reader might suspect it is the memoirish novel Alderman mentions. That suspicion is confirmed when the reader learns that the protagonist is named Naomi Alderman.

The protagonist has an issue with her weight, or at least her mother did, or perhaps society does. Alderman (the character) explains how her British upbringing as an overweight Orthodox Jew promoted a conflict between her shame at not being slim and sexy and her shame at wanting to be sexy. But the novel’s Alderman has many other issues. Her life was “extremely difficult” when she was fourteen, “at least as difficult as it is now.” She has had a series of miscarriages. She has “always had a horror of falling.” She “resists the reality of change.” She complains that “my highly productive intellectual life is sometimes a way of escaping from my emotional life.” She is lonely. Her mother died after enduring a series of strokes, the consequences of which she describes in detail. The pandemic messed with a television show she was writing. Toward the novel’s end, she tells us that she suffers from “a variety of illnesses that seemed related to stress,” including an irritated bowel. This might be more than the reader needs to know.

The reader knows all this, of course, because Alderman (the character) discusses her misery in dreadful detail. After she mentions a miscarriage to her father and he responds by changing the subject, Alderman says “‘I see, there’s no room for me to talk about my pain, is there?” If her father won’t give her that room, Alderman (the author) takes advantage of a reader who must share her pain or abandon the book. I came close to the latter choice but persevered for the sake of learning more about the book’s only intriguing characters: critters that resemble “mini mammoths” and so are dubbed mimmoths.

Mimmoths appear suddenly in England although some people claim to have seen them (or something like them) years earlier. They have a flat face and a furry body, maybe the size of a badger, with a tail that fans. The most distinguishing feature of a mimmoth is its proboscis.

Initially, mimmoths stay out of sight. Later they are observed dancing in fields and yards (or at least that’s how humans interpret their interaction). They tend to avoid contact with humans although one comforts Alderman by stroking her arm with its proboscis when she is feeling even more down than usual. She realizes that a mimmoth gave her what she has never received from a man: “the comforting absolute acceptance of its body wrapped around mine.” If that’s the case, one wonders how she so often became pregnant, but those details she does not share.

As mimmoths become more prevalent, the public debates whether they should be accepted or killed. They seem indifferent to humans and entirely harmless, so naturally some humans want to annihilate them. If attacked, they defend themselves with appropriate force, then do what they can to assist their assailants. They prove capable of outsmarting traps but they can’t outrun bullets, so they are occasionally killed, particularly in America where everyone is armed and eager to shoot something.

As time goes by, a character who might be a bit disturbed determines that killing a mammoth reduces the human birth rate within a one mile (at most) radius of the site of the mammoth’s death. When left alone, however, mimmoths spread mycelial threads in the soil that improve crop production and generally make people healthier.

I am all in favor of mimmoths and want to know more about them. Unfortunately, Alderman (the author) sacrificed plot development to flesh out the “memoirish” aspect of the novel. Frankly, her depressing life killed the fun of the mimmoths for me, as did Alderman’s (the character’s) incessant commentary on social issues that had little to do with mimmoths.

Some of Alderman’s pontificating is over the top. For example, “Calling a woman hot is the same as calling her ugly; only very young or very naive women are deceived about this. Both are ways to say: The only thing that is important about you is your looks.” This is silly. Calling a woman ugly would be rude, but calling her hot in a non-harassing way does not necessarily reduce her to a single attribute. If I say “You’re smart” to a woman, am I saying the only important thing about her is her intelligence? To compliment a woman’s looks is not to suggest that her looks are the only admirable thing about her.

At best, fuzzy thinking like this might have a place in an essay or academic lecture targeted at a like-minded audience. It might even fit within a memoir, where authors feel free to express every thought that pops into their heads. In The Strangers, a book that has at least the trappings of a novel, pontificating too often interrupts the flow and does little to advance the story. The novel’s middle is bogged down by Alderman’s relentless commentary about how the world is horribly unfair to her. And Alderman is given to observations like “While we are alive, things will change” and “we are going to go on being alive until the very day we die” and “we do not walk through the world clean and unpained,” shared with the reader as if they are profound insights rather than obvious truths.

This is not to say that I disagree with all of Alderman’s many asides. When she blames “Andrew Wakefield – the inventor of the completely debunked theory that vaccines cause autism” for “the deaths of so many children around the world,” she has a valid point. Still, this observation — although tangentially relevant to a story that involves speculation about the harm that might be caused by mimmoths — does little to advance the plot.

Perhaps more compassionate readers will appreciate Alderman’s story for its telling of the emotional angst she experiences. I enjoyed both The Power and The Future, two science fiction novels that I appreciated for intelligent, “outside the box” storytelling. I felt cheated out of the possibility of an interesting story about mimmoths — a story Alderman all but abandons — because Alderman preferred to write a relatively dull, self-pitying story about herself. I admired Alderman’s prose style and was captivated by the sporadic efforts she made to build a world inhabited by mimmoths, but in the end the story is too much Alderman and too little mimmoth.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

High Side by Jaime Oliveira

Published by Amazon Original Stories on September 29, 2026

Motorcycle enthusiasts who want to make time for a short story might be attracted to “High Side.” I don’t know if this nonsensical tale of motorcyclists robbing banks will appeal to any other audience.

Billy Miller raced motorcycles until he had a high side crash (“That’s when your rear tire slips, hooks, and launches you over the bars like a slingshot.”). The crash ended his racing career. He went to work as a mechanic in his father’s garage. His father died but Billy is still there.

Billy’s older brother Cole left home because he “stopped winning races” and “Dad stopped being a dad. At least to Cole.” Now Cole is back. He’s “putting together a crew” to rob banks in the southwest. Their scheme is to hit banks in small counties where police departments have no helicopters. Cole figures they can outrun police cars on their high-speed bikes. A tractor-trailer will haul the bikes from job to job so they can’t be identified on the open road.

And that’s the story. Cole and Billy and a crew of barely described criminals rob some banks. Two women are part of the crew so Billy naturally gets involved with one of them. Near the story’s end, a job — the inevitable “big score” — goes wrong. Will Billy escape? What about Cole? Or Billy’s new squeeze? The real question is whether, in such a threadbare story, a reader will care.

The plot takes its only twist when the reader learns that one of the crew is an informant. The informant reports to Lennox, an FBI agent with all the personality of a soggy tea bag. The informant's identity will likely be obvious to the reader. Billy discovers that one of his crew members is working for the FBI but inexplicably proceeds with the heist anyway. That makes zero sense, but logic plays no part in the story.

“High Side” is supposedly “in development as a blockbuster film at Paramount Pictures.” Well, okay, it has gun battles and explosions and cheesy romance so it might make a ton of money. It would have to be better than the story, which I suppose was originally written as a treatment for the film. It still reads that way — the bones of the story are there, but they are covered with little flesh. Given the absence of well-rounded characters, the predictable plot, and the sloppy storytelling, I can’t think of a reason for crime fiction fans to read “High Side.”

NOT RECOMMENDED

London Station by David McCloskey

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on September 29, 2026

Some of the most interesting spy novels expose the ineptness of political hacks who substitute their questionable judgment for that of career intelligence professionals. London Station imagines that a far-right American president has placed “a businessman with zero intelligence or national security experience” in charge of the CIA.

Bobby Jerome was running a family business, B.J. Lenore, “the largest residential homebuilder in the United States,” before the president made him director of the CIA. Jerome brings in two former B.J. Lenore executives: Harry Kellman as Deputy Director of Operations and Stu Bricker, “a slave-driving workaholic,” as Special Assistant to the DDO.

Like many arrogant political appointees who lack experience with the government, the home builders don’t understand the difference between operating a business for profit and operating a government agency for the nation’s good. But like many such appointees, they understand the concept of self-enrichment. All that gives London Station a timely feel.

The president believes that America’s allies are taking advantage of the US (sound familiar?) in their intelligence sharing. Adopting the president’s disdain for “globalism” (meaning cooperation with allies) and his philosophy that bullying is the best solution to every problem, Jerome tells the head of the Secret Intelligence Service that Britain “is taking advantage of the American taxpayer” by “freeloading” because the US contributes more intelligence than Britain, and “we can’t just keep on allowing this, can we? What sort of country allows itself to be picked apart by smaller, weaker countries?” To the surprise of no reader who pays attention to international affairs, alienating America’s allies turns out to be a bad strategy for governance.

The novel opens with CIA agent Artemis Aphrodite Procter trying to enlist a Chinese asset on British soil. In breach of protocol, she doesn’t alert the SIS of her plan and in fact pretends to be an SIS agent. Procter is embarrassed when, after her overture is rejected, she is arrested when her disguise falls off in a collision with a bicycle.

As Procter awaits her discipline, Ollie Welch, the SIS Head of Station in Tehran, urgently requests American assistance in exfiltrating a Persian agent and his ten-year-old son before the agent, codenamed WINSTON, can be killed by the Revolutionary Guard. The CIA’s Chief of Station in London, Charlie Clare, wants to follow the tradition of approving such requests, but he’s overridden — and then fired — by Jerome to make a point that Americans won’t be told what to do by the British. Things do not go well for WINSTON or for Welch when their expected exfil assistance fails to materialize.

To stick his thumb in the eye of SIS, Jerome installs Procter — the woman who just got herself arrested for conducting unauthorized spying in London — as the new Chief of Station in London. Proctor would rather be conducting operations than overseeing them but taking the promotion is marginally better than losing her job.

The novel’s other key player is Hubert Hamro. He runs Mimir, a private intelligence firm, for its billionaire owner. The president is a fan of privatization so Mimir expects to do well under his administration. Hamro pitches a disgruntled Ollie Welch on joining Mimir but Ollie has his own plans.

Much of the novel sets up the conflicts that will erupt among the major characters. The plot pits the US and British intelligence services against each other as they neglect their mutual enemies. Someone has acquired the identities of various assets in China and is selling the information to the highest bidder. It’s up to Procter to identify the villain. It isn’t much of a spoiler to note that inept political hacks are at the heart of the problem.

London Station benefits from strong characterization. Procter — a protagonist in two earlier novels — is smart, resilient, and devious. Her lust for field work sets up convincing inner turmoil when she’s given a desk job, while her foul mouth and cantankerous attitude make her an ideal character to pit against bureaucrats.

I wasn’t particularly convinced that a lower-level spy would — with no clear motivation — steal secrets from an SIS laptop or reveal secrets to her (non-SIS-approved) therapist, but accepting that plot element is the price of enjoying the story. In most other respects, the plot is credible. The story moves quickly despite the political machinations in which the large cast of characters indulge.

If for no other reason, I would recommend London Station for its tweaking of far-right antipathy to globalism and the inevitable corruption that occurs when business leaders with no government experience are given the keys to America’s treasury. That David McCloskey manages to tell an engaging story while illustrating those points solidifies my recommendation.

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