Reading matters

'The Colombian Mule' by Massimo Carlotto

Fiction - paperback; Orion (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ) - New Ed edition; 184  pages; 2004.

"Somehow the Colombian knew he was fucked the moment he met the cop's gaze."

So begins Massimo Carlotto's hardboiled Italian noir novel The Colombian Mule, which opens with Arias Cuevas being detained at Venice airport with a belly full of cocaine. When Cuevas describes his drug-smuggling contact -- "about fifty, medium-height, a bit fat, with light brown hair" -- the Italian police arrest the wrong man. Is it a case of mistaken identity, or are the police bending the law for their own means?

'Death's Dark Abyss' by Massimo Carlotto

Fiction - paperback; Europa Editions; 152  pages; 2007. (Translated from the Italian  by Lawrence Venuti.) REVIEW COPY.

If  you were the victim of a horrendous crime in which your spouse and child were murdered and you were later given the opportunity to dole out your own form of justice, would you do it?

This is the premise behind Massimo Carlotto's dark and disturbing Death's Dark Abyss, which is released in the UK by Europa Editions, an Italian independent publisher, later this week (February 8).