Dead Lagoon

Rating:
Summary: Zen in Venice
Review: Dibdin's Italian police detective Aurelio Zen visits his old hometown of Venice on a purely personal and pecuniary quest.

Needing money, Zen has agreed to search for the body - dead or alive - of a vanished American millionaire whose estate cannot be settled while his whereabouts are in doubt. Since this sort of side job is illegal, Zen reviews the Venice docket for a case that might give him cover. If his colleagues think it peculiar that he has been sent from Rome to investigate the "haunting" of a dotty old lady - contessa or not - they are relieved to have it off their shoulders.

Zen pursues his disparate cases in between revisiting the haunts of his childhood, now hopelessly transformed, and kindling a new, possibly dangerous flame.

This is a dark, richly textured and densely atmospheric novel, steeped in the beauty of history and architecture and the corruption of Italian politics. Events are more inevitable than suspenseful and Zen, solving each of his mysteries in turn, is a hero to no one, including himself.