Rating: 
Summary: The opening of a great series
Review: Michael Dibdin is a genre writer of many styles. He has written stand alone thrillers, The Tryst and Dark Spectre, parodies, The Last Sherlock Homes Story and The Dying of the Light, and one of the great modern detective series - the Aurelio Zen novels. This is the first novel in that series. Critically applauded at the time of original publication (and winner of the British CWA Gold Dagger Award for crime novel of the year) it perhaps deserves reappraisal in the light of the other books in the series.The Zen novels take place around Italy, this in Perugia. Zen is seconded there from Rome, following political pressure being placed on his superiors. The pressure is brought because an important businessman has been kidnapped, and in the many months he has been missing the local police seem to be having trouble finding the kidnappers. Zen's imposition is resented by locals, and his intervention used by members of the businessman's family, and the local prosecutors. In its favour the novel has a strong sense of place, Perugia being well evoked; and wonderful characterisation. Zen is one of the great fictional detectives. He starts here a man on the shelf. Having been sidelined during a kidnapping investigation many years before, he has been out of operative duty for some time. He is not quite as he seems, not wholly corrupt, a man au fait with the politics of the police force. There are many contradictions in his character. Also, Zen is an outsider. He is from Venice, the wrong part of the country for some. Zen's opening scene in the novel says much of his character. As a robbery takes place on a train, he sits by and watches. He is berated by his fellow passengers, then at the next station leaves the train to make some phone calls. The reader is never completely sure where they stand with Zen. The sketchy family background hinted at in this novel is fleshed out in later novels. However, the joy in this novel is the strength of the minor characters. The Miletti family (the kidnapped man's children) and their partners are well drawn. The Marxist prosecutor is a wonderful character. Partly jealous at the Miletti fortune, partly zealous to perform his job well, but never above playing political games. Characterisation is brought out through small actions, minor insults. Sometimes Dibdin tells the reader, rather than showing (e.g. the treatment of Ivy Cook at an early family dinner). These glitches are less pronounced in later novels in the series. The plotting is sound, the novel part puzzle, part atmospheric. It is an enjoyable work. It is in the subsequent novels in the series where plotting is tightened, and characterisation strengthened, together with the increasing familiarity with the principal and his regular support, that Dibdin's strengths as a writer really show. If you enjoyed Ratking try Dibdin's Cabal or Vendetta, or the Dalziel and Pascoe series of novels of Reginald Hill (Particularly Deadheads, Bones and Silence, or A Killing Kindness) or Ian Rankin's Mortal Causes or The Black Book (two Rebus novels).
Rating: 
Summary: Flat, contrived and not too interesting.
Review: The two stars are for location and local politics. The writer could not seem to decide who's voice he was telling the story in. I struggled to finish.
Rating:
Summary: First Book is Good
Review: This is the first book in Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series. It's a fine story that marks a good introduction to this series. You learn just enough during the course of the stories to want to learn more, which you do in future installments. It sets the template for what is to come: Zen is given a case that no one really wants solved, there is trouble. Good, solid mystery with many interesting secondary charracters. Read the first, you will continue to the last. Maybe not compulsively but steadily.
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