Pile by the Bed reviews Robot Artists and Black Swans a series of Italian Fantascienza short stories by Bruce Sterling written under his European pseudonym Bruno Argento.

Pile by the Bed reviews Flowers Over the Inferno by Ilaria Tuti, an Italian procedural set in a small skiiing village in the Italian alps.

Much like the spy thrillers penned by former head of MI5 Stella Rimington, Italian author Gianrico Carofilgio brings a significant amount of authenticity to his crime novels. Carofiglio was an Italian senator but before that he was an anti-mafia prosecutor. He is best known for a crime series featuring lawyer Guido Guerrieri but in his new book The Cold Summer he comes even closer to home with a protagonist who is a police investigator and an investigation that takes place during an internal mafia war in the early 1990s. A war seems to have broken out in the Apulian mafia of the Bari area. Due to the codes of silence and honour the police are playing catch-up. But then a rumour gets around that the son of the mafia godfather Grimaldi has been kidnapped and everything heats up. The first third of the book deals with the police trying to get to the bottom of a kidnapping that no one will talk about and which has tragic results. The second third explores the mafia war in detail. One of the instigators  of that war hands himself in to the police to prove he had nothing to do with the kidnapping…

Martin Cruz Smith takes a break from his long running Arkady Renko Russian crime series which started with Gorky Park to explore a different corner of history. The Girl from Venice takes readers to Italy in the dying days of the Second World War. Italy is being bombed by the allies and is riven by division as Mussolini and the fascists cling on to power. At the same time the country is playing host to the German Western Front command and an increasingly desperate German army, many of whom can see the writing on the wall. But the focus of the novel is Innocenzo, or Cenzo, a fisherman of Pallesteria, a small town across the lagoon from Venice. When Cenzo picks up what he thinks to be a dead girl floating in the lagoon he steps into a world of trouble. The girl, Gulia, very much alive, has escaped from a German attack that killed her Jewish family and the two end up in the middle of a number of power plays as various people try to manoeuvre as the war ends. Chief among these is Cenzo’s brother, a famous actor and propagandist for the Mussolini regime. Cenzo, while having…

For a series that initially was only going to run for a couple of books, the Leone Scarmacio series seems to have developed legs. The Hit is the third in the series and leaves plenty of balls in the air for future instalments. Which is welcome as this is a series that has improved with each outing. In The Hit, Detective Inspector Leone Scarmacio is brought in to investigate the kidnapping of the wife and child of a well known television producer. From the start it is clear something is off about the case and it soon becomes clear that there may be mafia involvement. At the same time Scarmacio, who joined the police to leave a life in the mafia behind, is being pressured by his father’s old lieutenant. As the mafia connection to his current case starts to solidify, Scarmacio’s professional and personal lives start to collide. Leone Scarmacio is a great crime fiction lead. Determined to walk a virtuous path in a corrupt society he is also endlessly challenged by his past. In this book that past comes even closer as he learns some truths surrounding his father’s death, the event that triggered his decision to join…