The Venice Train (Romans Durs‪)‬

A chance encounter on a night train plunges an ordinary man into a world of guilt, lies, and paranoia.

On a night train from Venice to Paris, Justin Calmar, a middle-aged husband and father, agrees to help a stranger with an urgent errand. Retrieving a suitcase from a station locker and delivering it to a nearby address, he finds the murdered body of a young woman and unwittingly becomes entangled in her death. Inside the suitcase is a small fortune, he discovers, and as he attempts to resume his life in Paris, this sudden windfall nags at his psyche. As police investigations mount and his paranoia deepens, Calmar is forced to confront how restrained his life has been, and how little freedom he truly has.

The Venice Train is both a taut psychological thriller and a pitiless study of male fantasy. With characteristic economy and precision, Georges Simenon strips away his characters’ illusions, laying bare how easily an act of kindness can turn into complicity—and how quickly an ordinary life can unravel.