Odysseus’ Choice
by Peter Portelli
published by Midsea Books, 2025
Although as he wrote it author Peter Portelli believed that his debut book, The Order (2023), would be his only one, its well-deserved success encouraged him to once again put pen to paper. His second novel, Odysseus’s Choice was published earlier this autumn.
Equally worthy of acclaim, it’s a story of twists and turns that takes the reader on a gripping ride from palazzo to pathology lab and uncovers a world of sunken war ships and subterfuge in Bari, a port on the Adriatic Sea in southeastern Italy. Bari was an essential logistics hub during World War II which suffered an unexpected air raid leading to a terrible accumulation of bodies in the city’s hospital.
“Although the book is fictitious, what happened in Bari is one of the greatest cover-up stories of World War II,” says Portelli.
In Odysseus’s Choice, the dangerous cargo in one of the ships casts a shadow on the contemporary city as Portelli weaves together two stories, the first set against the backdrop of the World War II and the second following the 21st-century repercussions.
Author Peter Portelli
As New York forensic investigator Casey Morgan takes time out from a gradually unfolding drama in her own life, she finds herself faced with a dead man on the beach whose symptoms suggest potential peril for the whole population.
With a nose like a bloodhound and Agente Luca Salieri from the Italian Polizia at her side, she sets out to investigate without clear evidence linking the man’s death to any crime and only a hunch that there’s a worrying malevolence behind the scenes. It’s a tall order when the pages are populated by the good, the gun-toting bad and the ugly, and not everyone is what they seem.
The title refers to the choice of the Homer’s Odysseus who, as he ‘was travelling back to his loving wife [after considerable time away], had to pass the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. He had a choice to make.
Sail close to Scylla, an invincible monster that would surely kill some of his men or sail past Charybdis, which would destroy his ship and kill all his men. And so, this ancient Greek hero makes what he believes to be the sensible choice, to sacrifice some for the good of the many. But is that even the whole story?
Roll forward to autumn 1943, shortly after the Italians have switched their allegiance from the Axis Alliance to the Allies, and the controlling force in Bari is British.
SS John Harvey on fire in 1943. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
“I wonder how this office would have looked under the previous regime,” muses the upstanding hospital sister, Italian Countess Speranza, the Corps of Volunteer Nurses of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, an all-female auxiliary unit of the Italian army, as she notes that although the map legends would previously have been written in Italian or German, “Sometimes change brings more of the same”.
In war there is no right or wrong. There is only winning or losing
Her husband, whom we understand to be a good man, is incarcerated for supporting the fallen fascist regime but, she explains, “It was a choice between the mad men to the left and the mad men to the right”. Are many ‘truths’ simply a matter of perspective?
At the helm locally, Colonel Hale is taking life-changing decisions for people in the city and further afield as he and the novel’s other players question whose lives “as expendable as pawns in the march to topple the Führer?”
“In war there is no right or wrong. There is only winning or losing,” says Portelli’s cold-blooded British Prime Minister as he flippantly suggests that morality “is simply a question of fashion changing, like long and short skirts”.
And, as the scene is set, President Roosevelt asks himself, “Do I save my conscience or my people?”
Everyone’s different version of the right path and the US Doctor Alexander finds himself in opposition to Hale as he unearths unpalatable truths. What should a doctor do if his Hippocratic oath is at odds with the war effort?
A map of the city of Bari, Italy.
Alexander is based on a real-life physician and cardiologist turned chemical weapons expert, Lt Col Stewart Francis Alexander, who led an investigation in Bari where, there, the effects of poison gas were clear despite the post-WWI prohibition of chemical warfare in the Geneva Convention. [There is an overview of his valuable contribution to medical science along with other background information in the Author’s Note at the end of Odysseus’ Choice.]
The novel also raises interesting issues about the press and their role in major disasters, military campaigns and political activities: for Hale and his superiors, accurate reporting was neither convenient or desirable, so how could it be managed?
Sometimes, “It is not necessary to bury the truth. It is merely sufficient to delay it until nobody cares,” says Churchill, a sentiment that resonates all too closely with much of the decision-making of powerful politicians in today’s world. Is it true as Casey says that “hope is hopelessness in disguise?”
And back in contemporary Bari, Casey and Luca confront the family dynamics of a rich Italian siblings with a mafia past and contemporary terrorism on an ambitious scale as danger lurks in coastal caves. Infused with love, loyalty and integrity, the tendrils snake from a rogue SAS suspect to an M15 agent, and from small-scale bravery to bold Bond-style action, to a satisfying conclusion.
Odysseus’ Choice is not only an absorbing read peppered with strong characters and rich descriptions. Its searching questions on right and wrong and the decisions made in the murky middle ground will stay with you long after the fast-paced finale and Casey’s return to America. I can’t wait to read her next adventure!
Odysseus’ Choice is published by Midsea Books.
