Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery
(Libby/OverDrive eBook, Kindle)

Despite winning back-to-back Golden Dagger awards in Britain, Michael Dibdin is only now emerging from near-obscurity on this side of the pond, thanks to the recent appearance of two critically acclaimed novels, The Tryst [BKL D 15 89] and Dirty Tricks [BKL S 15 91]. Vendetta makes it a hat trick for this multitalented writer. The novel stars Aurelio Zen of Italy's Ministry of the Interior, a much put-upon investigator who must contend with a home-ridden mother, a back-stabbing bunch of fellow cops, and an unrequited passion for a younger woman. There's also the case at hand: the multiple shooting of a rich industrialist and his three dinner guests, preserved on video by the dead man's home-security system. From the onset, Zen is tugged two ways: his superiors would clearly like the crime solved one way, while the harassed inspector finds himself forced to take things rather more personally, as he is ineptly tailed, robbed, and given cryptic messages. Dibdin cuts periodically to his killer: disturbed reveries, chillingly extended passion and pain. For the reader, the crime is clearly unsolvable, yet the occasional clue still manages to tantalize. The solution arrives fast and a bit pat, but Dibdin effectively blends the politics with the paranoia. ~--Peter Robertson

Corruption in high places, underworld skulduggery and a vendetta among mountainfolk are ingredients for murder in this literate, suspenseful thriller. An intruder guns down an eccentric Sardinian billionaire, his wife and two guests in his seemingly impregnable villa. Enter befuddled Venetian inspector Aurelio Zen, last encountered in Dibdin's Ratking. Zen, who has a perfunctory love life, a half-senile, bad-tempered mother and an intuitive faculty sometimes worthy of his name, now works for an Italian government ministry in Rome. He's dispatched to Sardinia to get the chief suspect, a politician's friend, off the hook. Two crazies want Zen rubbed out: a just-released convict whom he'd sent to jail years ago, and the killer, whose lyrical, half-mad ramblings punctuate the narrative--of course, the two could be the same person. Spinning a plot as convoluted as Sardinia's winding streets, Dibdin illuminates a deeply corrupted society and ultimately vindicates his hero, who outmaneuvers the supercops trying to silence him. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Aurelio Zen, the Italian Maigret, now working out of Rome's criminal investigation division, is assigned the Villa Burolo massacre--in which every member of the wealthy Burolo's house party died, with the scene captured on videotape (as were most of the activities at the villa)! While Zen ponders, someone lifts the videotape from his house and taunts him with notes. But it's only after Zen's superiors send him off to Sardinia to frame the ""murderer"" they have at hand that Zen draws the right connections between a recently slain magistrate, an informer, and the threats against himself--which tie in with the prison release of Vasco Ernesto Spadola. Waylaid in a ravine, Zen barely escapes Spadola--before assigning the massacre murders to a complicated bit of demented revenge at the hands of a simple-minded woman. A multilayered tale in which Dibdin (Dirty Tricks, p. 970, etc.) juggles cynicism (in Italian officialdom, expediency wins the day--every time), humor (zen's lust), and chagrin (zen's relationship with his mother versus hers with her family of ""Auntie""-sitters). But the interspersing of the killer's thoughts is far too corny a ploy for a writer of Dibdin's skill. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.