Michael Dibdin

It's a routine assignment, and Aurelio Zen is biding his time in Calabria while the locals go about their mysterious business. Routine, that is, until an advance scout for an American film company suddenly vanishes. Beneath the surface of a tight-knit traditional community--with secrets and loyalties that go back centuries--violent forces are at work. Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth behind a brutal...

Zen returns to his native Venice. He is searching for the ghostly tormentors of a half-demented "contessa" and a vanished American millionaire whose family is paying Zen under the table to determine his whereabouts-dead or alive. But he keeps stumbling over corpses that are distressingly concrete: from the crooked cop found drowned in one of the city's noisome "black wells" to a brand-new skeleton that surfaces on the Isle of the Dead.

After his adventures in Cosi Fan Tutti, Aurelio Zen finds himself back in Rome, sneezing in a damp wine cellar and being given another unorthodox assignment. Detective Aurelio Zen is dispatched to Piedmont to investigate the mutilation and murder of a wealthy wine grower. He discovers a closed society with lots of secrets.

Italian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen is dispatched to investigate the kidnapping of Ruggiero Miletti, a powerful Perugian industrialist. But nobody much wants Zen to succeed: not the local authorities, who view him as an interloper, and certainly not Miletti's children, who seem content to let the head of the family languish in the hands of his abductors--if he's still alive. Was Miletti truly the victim of professionals? Or might his kidnapper...

An Aurelio Zen Novel
Michael Dibdin's overburdened Italian police inspector has been transferred to Naples, where the rule of law is so lax that a police station may double as a brothel. But this time, having alienated superiors with his impolitic zealousness in every previous posting, Zen is determined not to make waves.
Too bad an American sailor (who may be neither American nor a sailor) knifes one of his opposite numbers in Naples's...

In Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen, Michael Dibdin has given the mystery one of its most complex and compelling protagonists: a man wearily trying to enforce the law in a society where the law is constantly being bent. In this, the first novel he appears in, Zen himself has been assigned to do some law bending. Officials in a high government ministry want him to finger someone--anyone--for the murder of an eccentric billionaire, whose corrupt...