Another disappointment! While I quite liked Michael Dibdin's End Games (reviewed here ), his "Cabal" (1992), a substandard thriller, is a badly botched effort. Although The Scotsman in its back-cover blurb pronounces: "Michael Dibdin is an absolutely sensational writer", my take would be: "Mic...
In Michael Dibdin's Back to Bologna, series character Aurelio Zen is sent to the city of the title to keep an eye on the progress of the police in solving the murder of a wealthy man who happened to own the local, struggling soccer team and who was loathed by thousands of soccer fans for his trea...
You know the twist.You wouldn't be here if you didn't.But for the handful of readers who stumble here, innocent to the gory ways of the world, we'll ignore the twist in the room no matter how much Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling may stare at it jealously. Dibdin is the first to make a certain tw...
http://avadhutrecommends.wordpress.com/Inspector Montalbano piqued my interest in Italian crime series. I started looking for good Italian mysteries and the name that kept cropping up at every corner was Aurelio Zen by Michael Dibdin. So, I jumped into middle of the series with Blood Rain. Right ...
This is the only one of Dibdin's books I've read. Definitely has its points. The characterization is very uneven, but can be very good (Dr. Lucchese) and even brilliant (Minot). The style is good and mostly engaging, thought sometimes he strains a bit too hard for intellectual stature even at the...
Like many of the reviews on this book, I turned to this book mostly after learning there was a Masterpiece Mystery series (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/zen/) coming out based on these books. And like many of the others, I find myself comparing Rufus Seawell's Zen with the character Dibdin ...
This book features Dibdin’s detective, Aurelio Zen, who hails originally from Venice though he now works from Rome. His boss asks him to look over a number of files and select one for investigation. The one he chooses turns out to be more complicated than expected. A body is discovered undergroun...
Zen proves that you can't go home again when his return to Venice goes wrong in several different ways. He needs money to find a larger place so that he, his mother and Tania can live together. Or at least that's the plan. He has an opportunity to take on a private project, working on behalf of...
This book is about bullying. Coming from the gut.My niece goes on about her mother who is always interpreting herself as Maltese, though her father wasn’t even born there and she has spent all of several days on the island. I totally agree with you, Martha. And yet despite that I’m perfectly capa...
Deze kerel leek dan weer geboren om de pen te hanteren. Ik leerde Dibdin (nog niet zo lang geleden overleden) kennen via een overijverige prof Nederlandse Taalkunde die me enkele van Dibdins Aurelio Zen-romans aansmeerde (net als boeken van Josef Skvorecky, Kinky Friedman en Robert B. Parker, du...
This is the complete review as it appears on my blog. Any links in the review on the blog are not reproduced here.This was a DNF. Note: minor spoilers.Set in Napoli (Naples) in Italy, this novel is one of a series, but it isn't the first in this series, and I haven't read any of the others, so ...
Michael Dibdin remains one of my favorite authors even though I sometimes find his plots and characterizations frustrating. Dibdin’s was a career cut too short. Whenever I see a Dibdin book out in e-book format, I order it. I know that whatever else I find, it will be literately and beautifully w...
Originally published on my blog here in January 1999.I'm in two minds about Dirty Tricks. On the one hand, it is excellently written and occasionally very funny. On the other, the character of the narrator and the events he describes are so convincingly unpleasant that I found it difficult to bri...
“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 c...
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 an...
‘Only just.’ ‘I prefer not to speak too loudly. Our enemies are everywhere.’ It was the man who had phoned him earlier at the Ministry. ‘You are probably wondering why you have been summoned at such short notice, and in this unusual fashion. I shall be frank. Many people think of the Curia as a m...
Now, stuck in a tail-back which from this point on the road seemed indefinitely long, she began to worry about being on time for her appointment. She was fully aware that this was simply an acceptable cover for her real worry, which was why she had an appointment in the first place. It was just a...
‘A noble speech. Many of us have made it before, at least in our own minds.’ Zen waved his hands in a gesture of apology and lowered his voice. ‘I’m sorry, Giovanni, but it was really horrific. It looked very much like a ritual killing, almost a pagan sacrifice, and it’s somehow got under my skin...
Ah. Oh, that’s interesting. Yes. Oh God. Oh my fucking God. Don’t stop, don’t stop. Lord Jesus Christ almighty. All right. Hmm. Whew. You’re awfully good, you know that?Good? How?With your hands.Do you want some wine?Wait, I’m still coming down.Is there any red left?I don’t know. I don’t know any...
And something that might once have been whisky.’ Irena passed back what looked like a fat twist of paper. ‘Try some of this.’ ‘Is this wise?’ asked Lucchese. ‘You may not be aware, my dear, that Dottor Zen is an officer of the law.’ The massive car slowed majestically to a halt. ‘You want to walk...
They think they’re so clever, the others, but their cleverness is lost on me. It’s a poison that doesn’t take, a disease I’m immune to. Their conjuring tricks are meant for them, the children of the light to whom everything is what it seems, the way it looks. The policeman just provided himself w...
The sun had just cleared the roof-line of the five-storey buildings on Via Martucci, and in the space of a few seconds its sharply angled brilliance transformed the scene like theatre lighting revealing a stage set. Each object, however mundane, was picked out by the soft yet intense glare, and i...
Someone slipped outside, making the boat rock. Then they were mobile, gliding silently across the darkened water towards a wall towering over them like the face of a cliff. A distant streetlamp, hidden from where they had been moored, cast its pallid flickers on the scene. By its light they could...
Averte oculos tuosme quia ipsi me avolare fecerunt. You are beautiful my love, sweet and graceful like Jerusalem, terrible as an army drawn up for battle. Avert your eyes from me, for they put me to flight.The Song of Songs 6:3 I An oily fog had mystified the streets, sheathing the façades to...
Not that he had any excuse for feeling hungry. They’d fed him something called ‘breakfast’ on the flight to Denmark, and something else called ‘a snack’ on the connecting plane to Fiumicino. But this wasn’t a question of physical hunger. His needs were deeper and more complex than that, and lucki...