Cette série de romans policiers offre un regard pénétrant sur les aspects moins visibles de la société italienne des vingt dernières années. Le personnage central est un commissaire antihéros, dont l'ironie et l'humour noir confèrent aux histoires un charme unique. Au fur et à mesure que la série progresse, le ton plus léger des œuvres antérieures s'approfondit pour aborder des thèmes plus sombres et complexes. Il s'agit d'enquêtes captivantes dissimulées sous la surface de l'Italie moderne.
Michael Dibdin's first Aurelio Zen mystery finds his stoic, philosophical Italian police commissioner investigating the kidnapping of Ruggiero Miletti, a powerful Perugian industrialist. However, the closer Zen peers into the rat's nest of the Miletti family's affairs, the more his suspicions rest on Ruggiero's wayward progeny.
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.But Oscar Burolo's murder would seem to be not just unsolvable but impossible. The magnate was killed on a heavily fortified Sardinian estate, where every room was monitored by video cameras. Those cameras captured Burolo's grisly death, but not the face of his killer. And that same killer, elusive, implacable, and deranged, may now be stalking Zen. Inexorable in its suspense, superbly atmospheric, Vendetta is further proof of Dibdin's mastery of the crime novel.
Que faisait le prince Ludovico Ruspanti au Vatican avant de plonger du haut de la coupole de la basilique Saint-Pierre de Rome ? Sous la protection de qui avait-il trouvé refuge alors même qu'il était recherché pour répondre ce diverses indélicatesses financières auxquelles la banque du Saint-Siège se trouvait mêlée ? S'est-il suicidé ou l'a-t-on poussé ? Le risque de scandale et les multiples interrogations soulevées par cette mort obligent - fait exceptionnel - les autorités vaticanes à collaborer avec la police criminelle italienne.Le détective Aurelio Zen verra le mystère s'épaissir au fur et à mesure de son enquête et les témoins disparaître les uns après les autres, jusqu'à ce qu'il comprenne qu'il n'a aucune chance de faire la lumière sur cette affaire s'il ne réussit pas à pénétrer la plus hermétique de toutes les sociétés secrètes de la Ville éternelle : la Cabale.
Among the emerging generation of crime writers, none is as stylish and intelligent as Michael Dibdin, who, in Dead Lagoon, gives us a deliciously creepy new novel featuring the urbane and skeptical Aurelio Zen, a detective whose unenviable task it is to combat crime in a country where today's superiors may be tomorrow's defendants. Zen returns to his native Venice. He is searching for the ghostly tormentors of a half-demented contessa and a vanished American millionaire whose family is paying Zen under the table to determine his whereabouts--dead or alive. But he keeps stumbling over corpses that are distressingly concrete: from the crooked cop found drowned in one of the city's noisome "black wells" to a brand-new skeleton that surfaces on the Isle of the Dead. The result is a mystery rich in character and deduction, and intensely informed about the history, politics, and manners of its Venetian setting.
Aurelio Zen's newest adventure is a delirious combination of the deadly serious and the seriously comic.With politics in Rome in flux yet again, Zen has landed in Naples as commander of the lowly harbor detail. Which leaves him time for a private life as "Alfonso Zembla" -- the name formed in the deaf ear of a wealth, seductive Neapolitan widow with several masons for asking "Dottor" Zembla's help in dissuading her daughters from marrying their possibly Mafia-associated fiances. Which Zen might be able to do -- his plan involves Neapolitan prostitutes masquerading as Albanian refuges -- except for the sudden spate of strange graffiti, marauding garbage trucks, officer impersonators, and disappearances he's expected to solve. Which in turn might be possible if Zen weren't being mistaken for the head of the most powerful and feared of Naples' crime families.... Murder mystery as opera buffa. The Godfather meets Tootsie. Here is Mozart's opera turned on its head to test the faithfulness of men and the stamina of Michael Dibdin's usually serious-minded police officer, as he becomes the unwitting stage manager for this masterful interpretation of murder, mayhem, and the mysteries of love.
After his adventures under sun-drenched Neapolitan skies in Cosi Fan Tutti, Aurelio Zen finds himself back in Rome, sneezing in a damp wine cellar and being given another unorthodox assignment: to release the jailed scion of an important wine-growing family who is accused of a brutal murder. Zen travels north to an Italy as outwardly serene as Naples was manic. Amid the quiet fields, autumnal skies and crumbling farmhouses of Piedmont, Zen must try to penetrate a traditional culture in which family and soil are inextricably linked. Here secrets can last for generations, and have a finish as long and lingering as that of a good Barbaresco. Zen must also face up to mysteries from his own past, as well as grapple with the greed, envy, hatred and love that are the human components of any landscape.
Writing a review of a Michael Dibdin novel is challenging, as all superlatives have been exhausted. In Blood Rain, Dibdin’s Italian detective, Aurelio Zen, is sent to Catania to assess spy operations aimed at infiltrating the Mafia. The physical dangers arise from the area's violence, while spiritual challenges stem from his interactions with his adopted daughter and his mother’s declining health. An American author might tackle this material with either a melancholic or tough-guy approach, likely set in L.A. or Florida. However, Dibdin infuses a Fellini-esque quality into his narrative, portraying a world rich in human experiences—sorrow, humor, fear, reflection, and poetry—where society reflects the complexities of humanity rather than being strictly good or bad. Despite the decay and corruption Zen faces, the novel lacks real anger. Zen embodies wisdom and acceptance, functioning as a detective in both literal and metaphysical senses, all without pretension. This novel stands out as an excellent and edifying read, offering a refreshing alternative to typical thrillers. Dibdin's introspective style is a welcome change from more sensational works.
Aurelio Zen was dead to the world. Under the next umbrella, a few desirable metres closer to the sea, Massimo Rutelli was just dead.Inspector Zen is back, but nobody's supposed to know it. After months in hospital recovering from a bomb attack on his car, 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. But when an alarming number of people are dropping dead around him, it seems just a matter of time before the Mafia manages to finish the job it bungled months before on a lonely Sicilian road. The pleasant monotony of resort life is cut short as Zen finds himself transported to a remote and strange world far from home...and wherever he goes, trouble follows.If you enjoyed the Inspector Zen Mystery series you may also like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.
348 393 9028: MEDUSA. After the heated pool, the air was distinctly cool, even down here in the sheltered terraces above lake Lugano. He keyed in the number, then turned to face the hillside behind the villa. The land rose precipitously, the contours marked by the looping line of Via Totone and its accompanying homes and gardens. There was no one in sight. When a group of Austrian cavers in the Italian Alps come across human remains at the bottom of a deep shaft, everyone assumes the death was accidental - until the still unidentified body is stolen from the morgue and the Defence Ministry puts a news blackout on the case. The whole affair has the whiff of political intrigue. The search for the truth leads Zen back into the murky history of post-war Italy and obscure corners of modern-day society to uncover the truth about a crime that everyone thought was as dead and buried as the victim. If you enjoyed the Inspector Zen Mystery series you may also like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.
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.
Detective and mystery stories. Mystery fiction. Aurelio Zen is posted to remote Calabria, at the toe of the Italian boot. And beneath the surface of a tight-knit, traditional community he discovers that violent forces are at work. There has been a brutal murder. Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth. But his mission is complicated by another secret which has drawn strangers from the other side of the world - a hunt for buried treasure launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing his bizarre and deadly obsession.
A single-volume edition of three of the crime novels featuring Italian detective Aurelio Zen: Ratking, Vendetta and Cabal.
