Medusa (Hardcover)

Like all of Dibdin's books, part of what makes us care is a vivid sense of what foggy streets smell like, or of the delicate sounds of a near-silent remote country hide-out, and part is Zen, a battered moralist who solves cases and then decides on what might be the right thing to do. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review
'Among British crime writers, he remains very much the man to beat. No one else can match him for style, for imagination, or for sheer beastliness,' Sunday Telegraph

Aurelio Zen has finally found contentment; living a happy domestic life with his girlfriend Gemma in Lucca, he works part time looking for new angles on out-of-the-way cases. One of these is a corpse found in the mountainous region of Alto Adige, seemingly that of a young man who has been dead for 30 years. Zen's suspicion that there's something fishy about the case is confirmed when he discovers that the military have claimed the body as their own and whisked it away to an undisclosed location. While Zen tries to discover the identity of the corpse, its murderers are in no doubt - while one flees to his childhood hideout, another tries to silence his co-conspirators, at any cost. As ever, Michael Dibdin's evocation of Italy and particularly the Italian police - now trying to project an image of helpful openness but still corrupt, secretive and permanently at war with other departments of the civil service - is horribly plausible. Particularly interesting here is the background of the 1970s, an often forgotten period in Italian history in which the extreme left and right wings fought bitterly for power, both convinced that the other side was plotting revolution and setting up elaborate secret operations in retaliation. Dibdin manages to combine acute characterization and elegant prose with the wry sense of humour that seems the only possible response to the fundamentally ludicrous nature of the modern world. A minor masterpiece. (Kirkus UK)

In a style cribbed from Maigret and Colombo, Dibdin shows Aurelio Zen with a new girlfriend to pamper, a new case to niggle at, and some maddening Italian political intrigue to sort through. The body had lain in a disused military tunnel in the Dolomites for 30 years when a trio of hikers found it, arousing the fears of the Ministry of Defense, the curiosity of the Ministry of the Interior, and a killing spree by secret intelligence honcho Alberto Guerrazzi, former head of the Medusa Operation. Representing the Interior, Zen is called in to identify the deceased and the reasons for his death. But his task is complicated when the carabinieri arrive and confiscate the corpse of Lt. Leonardo Ferrero, a Medusa operative and romancer of the seductive Claudia, wife of his commanding officer. All too quickly another Medusa man dies; yet another goes on the run; and Claudia leaps to her death rather than mentally revisit the deaths of her lover and her husband. Was Leonardo the victim of a fascist military plot to overthrow the government? Was he tortured by the extreme right, the extreme left, or a vengeful husband? And was that husband's fatal fall down the stairs merely a tragic accident? Dibdin, a champion assayer of politics and bedfellows (Blood Rain, 2000, etc.), herein masters the art of misdirection, leading the reader on a merry chase from villa to farm, from the gardens of Rome to the casinos of Switzerland. (Kirkus Reviews)

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• Books > Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Authors, A-Z > D > Dibdin, Michael
• Books > Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Mystery
• Books > Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Thrillers
• Books > Fiction

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