Award-winning author of ten novels Joseph Olshan's new book is a noir thriller that explores the complexities of interpersonal relationships and the secrets hidden in plain sight in family history. 

When a PHD candidate in Italian learns that his beloved mentor has taken his own life, a distrust of the police’s conclusion leads him to search for clues and for people in order to explain the bizarre and inexplicable mystery of death that turns out to have a very different consequence than he ever expected.

When Milo Rossi, a graduate student in Italian at New York University, is awakened one morning by a Westchester County policeman and told that his mentor apparently has hanged himself, he instinctively distrusts the coroner’s verdict.  After all, he’d just the night before spent a quiet evening in Lenny D’Ambrosio’s company, discussing literature in translation and the complicated life and death of Primo Levi and had not detected a trace of melancholy. Searching for clues that will explain Lenny’s demise brings Milo in contact with an acquaintance of his brother, Carlo who died in a car accident four years earlier. The startling and unnerving details that he learns about his brother's death drives Milo to the farthest reaches of Manhattan and then to Italy. There, he gets ensnared in a channel of illegal pornography being made with undocumented actors who have been trafficked into the country and forced into the sex trade. Shattered by harrowing truths that he learns abroad, he returns to America sorrowful and yet enlightened.