Pietro Gerber Books in Order

The Pietro Gerber books are quieter on the surface than Carrisi’s serial‑killer chases, but the tension runs just as deep. Gerber is a child psychologist and hypnotist in Florence, known locally as the addormentatore di bambini, the man who puts children to sleep so their memories can speak. He often works alongside judges and police, using carefully guided sessions to unlock trauma or buried facts that can change the course of an investigation.

In La casa delle voci, that work takes an unexpected turn. Gerber receives a call from an Australian colleague who asks him to treat an adult patient, Hanna Hall. Hanna is tormented by fragments of childhood memory that seem to show a murder committed in a remote house ruled by strict rules and whispered warnings. As he hypnotises her, Gerber has to navigate not only the unreliability of memory but also the unsettling way Hanna seems to know things about his own past. The house of voices of the title is both a physical place and a metaphor for the stories we tell ourselves to stay safe.

La casa senza ricordi brings him a different kind of patient: Nico, a twelve‑year‑old boy found wandering in the woods of the Valle dell’Inferno with no memory of what happened to him. Someone has clearly cared for him, yet he will not speak. Inside his mind Gerber encounters a dark, locked space that refuses to open. When he finally finds the right trigger, a voice begins to tell a story that may belong to someone else entirely. The book becomes a race to untangle that story and to protect Nico before whoever engineered his silence can strike again.

In La casa delle luci, Gerber’s own reputation has been shaken by earlier cases. Even so, a Finnish au pair, Maja Salo, begs him to help the ten‑year‑old girl she cares for, Eva, who lives almost alone in a big, dim house on a hill near San Gimignano. Eva claims to have an invisible playmate, an unnamed friend who might be more threat than comfort. Under hypnosis, another child’s voice emerges through her, one that recognises Gerber and seems tied to a forgotten summer when he himself nearly died. The boundary between therapist and patient blurs as the investigation turns back on his childhood.

Taken together, these novels feel like psychological ghost stories where the hauntings come from memory, guilt and family secrets rather than clear supernatural forces. The settings—country houses, empty rooms, foggy Tuscan landscapes—mirror the minds Gerber explores: familiar at first glance, but full of locked doors and false walls. Hypnosis sessions, tapes and carefully chosen words become the tools of an investigation that happens almost entirely inside people’s heads.

Readers who like methodical police work will find something different here: slow‑burn mysteries built around suggestion, doubt and the fear that a remembered scene might be both true and completely wrong. Starting with La casa delle voci and moving through La casa senza ricordi and La casa delle luci lets you follow Gerber’s own story as he realises that the cases he takes on are quietly reshaping his sense of who he is.