Michael Dibdin Books In Order

Ratking

In this masterpiece of psychological suspense, 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 be someone closer to home: his preening son Daniele, with his million lire wardrobe and his profitable drug business? His daughter, Cinzia, whose vapid beauty conceals a devastating secret? The perverse Silvio, or the eldest son Pietro, the unscrupulous fixer who manipulates the plots of others for his own ends? As Zen tries to unravel this rat’s nest of family intrigue and official complicity, Michael Dibdin gives us one of his most accomplished thrillers, a chilling masterpiece of police procedure and psychological suspense. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Vendetta

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 dealings enriched some of the most exalted figures in Italian politics.

Cabal

In Cabal, master crime writer Michael Dibdin plunges us into a murky world of church spies, secret societies, cover ups, and mistaken identities. An apparent suicide in the Vatican may in fact have been a muder conducted by a centuries old Cabal within The Knights of Columbus. A discovery among the medieval manuscripts of the Vatican Library leads to a second death, Zen travels to Milan, where he faces a final, dramatic showdown. Meanwhile, Zen’s lover, the tantalizing Tania, is conducting her own covert operations which could well jeopardize everything Zen has worked for. Richly textured, wickedly entertaining, Cabal taps the mysterious beauty of Italy in a thriller that challenges our beliefs about love, allegiance, history, and power and the lengths to which we will go to protect them against the truth.

Dead Lagoon

Aurelio Zen returns to his native Venice to investigate the disappearance of a rich American resident but he soon learns that, amid the hazy light and shifting waters of the lagoon, nothing is what it seems. As Zen is drawn deeper into the complex and ambiguous mysteries surrounding the discovery of a skeletal corpse on an ossuary island in the north lagoon, he is also forced to confront a series of disturbing revelations about his own life.

Così Fan Tutti

An Aurelio Zen NovelMichael 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 harbor, and some local garbage collectors have taken to moonlighting in homicide. And when Zen becomes embroiled in a romantic intrigue involving love sick gangsters and prostitutes who pass themselves off as Albanian refugees, all Naples comes to resemble the set of the Mozart opera of the same title. Bawdy, suspenseful, and splendidly farcical, the result is an irresistible offering from a maestro of mystery. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A Long Finish

Ratking, Vendetta, Cabal, Dead Lagoon, Cos Fan Tutti in each of these masterfully suspenseful and atmospheric novels we have met Michael Dibdin’s Italian Criminalpol officer Aurelio Zen. Intelligent and urbane if a little weary, Zen galvanizes us not only with his ability to solve the most intractable crimes but also with his methodology. He is both devious and moral, a slave to the status quo and original in his thinking, amused by his own tor por and surprised by his drive. Now, in The Long Finish, he is driven by something new: a steelyinstinct for self preservation coupled with a love of good food and wine. After a riotous and heroic stint in Naples, Zen is back in Rome, meeting with a world famous film director at the instruction of his superiors. In the privacy of a remarkably well stocked wine cellar, the director whose influence clearly reaches beyond the entertainment industry convinces Zen to arrange for the release of the scion of an important wine growing family, who has been jailed for the murder of his own father. At stake for the director, a connoisseur of Piedmontese wines, is this year’s vintage: only the jailed man can ensure the timely harvesting of his family’s precious grapes. At stake for Zen: avoiding a posting to the dreaded Sicily. In Alba an outwardly serene village set among rolling hills that are planted with vines for as far as the eye can see Zen discovers that only spilled blood can separate a family from its land. And though murder here is rare, it is complex. But at least it’s accompanied by heaping plates of pasta, generous shavings of white truffles, and bottomless glas*ses of wine. If only Zen can keep his policing skills as sharp as his palate is pampered…
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Blood Rain

Despite his best efforts to please everyone and keep out of trouble, the veteran Italian Criminalpol officer Aurelio Zen has made more enemies than friends over the years. Now it’s payoff time. After his last case, amid the gentle hills and lush vineyards of Piedmont, Zen finally receives the order he has been dreading all his professional life: his next posting is to Sicily, heart of the Mafia’s power. The gruesome discovery of an unidentified, decomposed corpse sealed in a railway wagon on a deserted part of the island marks the beginning of Zen’s most difficult and dangerous case. And indeed, it soon turns out that he will need all his cunning and skill to survive in a world where unwritten rules are enforced with ruthless violence, where one false step can prove fatal, and where the truth must be paid for in blood. Set against the backdrop of the three thousand year old city of Catania, in the shadow of the smoldering volcano of Etna, Blood Rain reveals Aurelio Zen at his most desperate and driven, and Michael Dibdin’s writing at its most darkly atmospheric, galvanizing best.

And Then You Die

Aurelio Zen of Rome’s elite Criminalpol is back but nobody s supposed to know it. After months in the hospital healing from wounds sustained in a bomb attack on his car in Sicily, he is lying low under a false name at a beach resort on the Tuscan coast, waiting to testify in an imminent anti Mafia trial. In the meantime, he has nothing to do but enjoy the orderly and undemanding world of a classic Italian beach holiday: spending his days in his assigned chair on a well managed strip of pale sand, eating splendid seafood, and engaging in a mild flirtation with the attractive woman sitting under the next umbrella. Until he notices that an inordinate number of people each of whom might have been mistaken for Zen himself have been dropping dead around him. Now it seems to be just a matter of time before the Mafia manage to finish the job they bungled months before on a lonely Sicilian road. But though Zen has been out of commission for months, he hasn t lost any of his highly developed, legendary abilities to navigate treacherous waters. When he finds himself suddenly back in action, he begins to feel more alive than he has since the moments before he was almost dead, which might help keep him from being almost dead or worse yet again. In And Then You Die, Michael Dibdin has given us a suspenseful, sharply funny new chapter in the always unexpected and uncommonly entertaining saga of Aurelio Zen.

Medusa

Michael Dibdin’s veteran Italian police officer is back. The newest addition to this remarkable series consistently galvanizing as much for its revelation of the subtle complexities of Italian life as for its page turning suspense is a novel of long held secrets set against a sweeping background of political and passionate intrigue.

When a group of Austrian cavers exploring a network of abandoned military tunnels in the Italian Alps comes across human remains at the bottom of a deep shaft, everyone assumes the death was accidental. Until, that is, the still unidentified body is stolen from the morgue and the Defense Ministry puts a news blackout on the case. And is the recent car bombing in Campione D Italia, a tiny tax haven surrounded on all sides by Switzerland, somehow related? The whole affair has the whiff of political corruption. That s enough to interest Aurelio Zen s boss at the Interior Ministry, who wants to know who is hiding what from whom, and why.

The search for the truth leads Zen back into the murky history of postwar Italy and the obscure corners of modern day society to uncover the truth about a crime that everyone thought was as dead and buried as its victim.

Back to Bologna

In the latest installment in his critically acclaimed Italian mystery series, Michael Didbin sends Aurelio Zen to Italy’s culinary capital, Bologna, where he discovers that some cases are not quite what they appear to be. When the corpse of the shady Bologna industrialist who owns the local football team is found both shot and stabbed with a Parmesan knife, Aurelio Zen is summoned to oversee the investigation. Anxious for a break from his girlfriend, who attributes Zen s slow recovery from routine surgery to hypochondria, he is only too happy to take on what first appears to be an undemanding assignment. The case quickly spins out of control, becoming entangled with the fates of a student semiotics, a mysterious immigrant claiming to be royalty, and Bologna s most incompetent private detective. Meanwhile a prominent postmodern academic accuses Italy s leading celebrity chef of being a fraud. Back to Bologna is dazzlingly plotted and delivers both comic and serious insights into the realities of today s Italy.

End Games

One of the world’s best crime fiction writers returns with his eleventh Aurelio Zen novel, a complex, breathtaking story about murder, malice, and monstrous egos set in the dangerous mountain region of Calabria, Italy. Winner of both the Gold Dagger and the Grand Prix de Litt rature Polici re for earlier novels in the Aurelio Zen series. In Calabria, Italy, an American lawyer is missing, presumed kidnapped. A movie company is about to start filming the story of the Book of Revelation. An obsessed games player, richer than Croesus, is determined to find an ancient Roman statue that is buried under a river. A team of mercenaries is on its way there from Iraq to assist. And Aurelio Zen s latest posting is Cosenza, Calabria, where the local chief of police has shot himself in the foot. Looking down on all this activity is the abandoned village of Altomonte, once the seat of the powerful Calopezzati family. When the lawyer s bloody corpse is discovered in Altomonte, Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the local code of silence and uncover the truth. But his quest is quickly complicated by the lavish and clandestine treasure hunt, which Zen learns is being carried out by no ordinary fanatics. Fast paced, multi layered, and full of unexpected turns, End Games takes the reader on a journey deep into a proud and ancient culture, and into the dark corners of the human heart. From the Hardcover edition.

The Last Sherlock Holmes Story

This award winning collection of adapted classic literature and original stories develops reading skills for low beginning through advanced students. Accessible language and carefully controlled vocabulary build students’ reading confidence. Introductions at the beginning of each story, illustrations throughout, and glossaries help build comprehension. Before, during, and after reading activities included in the back of each book strengthen student comprehension. Audio versions of selected titles provide great models of intonation and pronunciation of difficult words.

A Rich Full Death

Florence,1855. ‘The English are dying too much,’ the city’s police chief observes. And members of the foreign community in this quaint Italian backwater, both English and American, are indeed dying at an alarming rate and in an extraordinary variety of ingenious and horrible ways. With the local authorities out of their depth, the distinguished resident Robert Browning launches his own private investigation, aided and abetted by an expatriot Robert Booth. Unfortunately, their amateur sleuthing is hampered by the fact that each of their suspects becomes the next victim in a series of murders orchestrated by a killer with a taste for poetic justice. A Rich Full Death features characters both historical and imaginary, ranging from an enticing servant girl to Mr. Browning’s consumptive, world famous wife, Elizabeth Barrett, in a tale lush with period detail, intricately plotted, and with a truly astonishing final twist.

The Tryst

One of my patients thinks somebody’s trying to kill him, Aileen Macklin says to her husband over breakfast. A psychiatrist with a fading marriage, Aileen is haunted by the glue sniffing lad who comes to her in a panic, begging to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital for protection. Gary Dunn clearly needs help: ravaged by his squalid existence, he is paralyzed with fear about a murder he has witnessed and convinced he may be next. Unfortunately for Gary, he may just be right. And unfortunately for Aileen, she becomes far more involved in his case than professional ethics would recommend.

Dirty Tricks

A comedy of manners, a mystery thriller, and a sardonic satire whose deliciously unscrupulous narrator claims that everything he did regarding his victims was market led, Dirty Tricks is pure entertainment from one of the most inventive writers around. When the nameless narrator embarks upon an affair with Karen, a seemingly vapid P.E. teacher married to a boring accountant, he does not know her fetish is for adultery while her husband is in the room or loitering nearby. But once he finds out, he doesn t care. He has been abroad for twenty years, and since his return to merry old England he’s been startlingly uninhibited by morals or a conscience. Which is not only why he eventually gets involved with blackmail, a kidnapping, and two murders, but also how, with hilariously syllogistic logic, he s able to justify his role in all of it.

The Dying of the Light

One of England’s most acclaimed younger mystery writers, the creator of Detective Aurelio Zen, gives us a brilliant and haunting variation on the classic drawing room murder novel. The setting is Eventide Lodge, where the guests have gathered for tea. Colonel Weatherby is reading by the fire. Mrs. Hargreave III is whiling away her time at patience. And Miss Rosemary Travis and her friend, Dorothy, are wondering which of their housemates will be the next to die. For even as Michael Dibdin’s elderly sleuths debate clues and motives, it becomes clear that Eventide Lodge is not a genteel country inn but a place of ghastly cruelties and humiliations. A place where the logic of murder is…
almost comforting. At once affectionate homage and audacious satire, The Dying of the Light will delight any aficionado of Patricia Highsmith, Peter Dickinson, or Ruth Rendell.

Dark Spectre

In this majestically unnerving novel, Michael Dibdin, the creator of the acclaimed Aurelio Zen mysteries, explores themes that might have been ripped out of today’s headlines, as he charts America’s dual epidemic of religious cultism and random violence. The murders take place in distant cities and with no apparent motive. All that connects them is their cold blooded efficiency. But a dogged Seattle detective and a horribly bereaved survivor are about to come face to face with their perpetrator a man named Los, a self styled prophet who has the power to make his followers travel thousands of miles to kill for him. Out of mayhem and revelation, the minutiae of police work and the explosive contents of a psychotic mind, Michael Dibdin orchestrates a tour de force of dread. This should be read with the lights on and the doors firmly bolted.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a novel about love, sex, compulsion, midlife, and death, and about the power of the past to distort, shape, and reveal the present. Anthony is a British journalist whose American wife, Lucy, has suddenly died. Grieving and haunted, he becomes obsessed with her youth and the years before he met her. To find out more, he travels to a remote part of the Nevada desert to meet Lucy’s first husband. Their bizarre encounter, with its violent climax, marks the beginning of a journey that takes him across the world, to the edge of madness and into the darkest corners of the human heart. It is a journey in which he is hunted, haunted, never at peace, and never far from the woman he still loves. Sparely and unflinchingly written, unfolding with a spellbinding rhythm, as riveting as the obsession it tracks, Thanksgiving subtly reveals with precision, compassion, and resolution the emotional turmoil of an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances. It is a brilliant departure for Michael Dibdin.

The Vintage Book of Classic Crime

The great Raymond Chandler once noted that ‘the detective or mystery story…
has become so thoroughly explored that the real problem for a writer now is to avoid writing a mystery while appearing to do so.’ And that is precisely what the contributors in this masterful anthology have accomplished. For in The Vintage Book of Classic Crime, Michael Dibdin has assembled fifty four of the most stylish, original and subversive examples of the literature of murder. Whether written by eminent practitioners such as James M. Cain or Dashiell Hammett, or distinguished ‘amateurs’ like Ernest Hemingway or Franz Kafka, the stories, essays, and novel excerpts in this volume push past their genre’s familiar conventions to explore what makes crime CRIME. Suspenseful and exhilarating, hard boiled and high art, the result is a dazzling gallery of murder that reveals how daring and controversial crime writing can be. Contributors and stories include: James M. Cain, ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice” Raymond Chandler, ‘Pick up on Noon Street’; Anton Chekhov, ‘The Shooting Party’; Umberto Eco; William Faulkner, ‘Smoke’; Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Glass Key’; Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Killers’; George V. Higgins, ‘Trust’; Patricia Highsmith, ‘Strangers on a Train’; P.D. James and T.A. Critchley, ‘The Maul and the Pear Tree’; James Joyce; Franz Kafka; Elmore Leonard; Walter Mosley, ‘A Red Death’; Edgar Allan Poe,’The Tell tale Heart’; Georges Simenon, ‘Maiget’s Memoirs’; Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘Under the Knife’; Julian Symons, ‘The Man Who Killed Himself’; Barbara Vine, ‘A Dark Adapted Eye’; James Thurber; Oscar Wilde, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’; and Emile Zola, ‘Therese Raquin.’