Milo's Reckoning

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 the 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 drive Milo to the farthest reaches of New York City  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 the harrowing truths that he learns abroad, he returns to America sorrowful and yet enlightened.