Dead Lagoon (Aurelio Zen Series #4)

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.

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.

Publishers Weekly

Always an erudite crime writer, Dibdin places complex characters into exacting plot puzzles that unfold in evocative prose rich in historical and geographic color. In the fifth case (the last was Cabal) featuring his Italian policeman Aurelio Zen, the sleuth leaves Rome for his native Venice to trace the disappearance of a wealthy businessman. While visiting the haunts of his youth and stirring fleeting memories (the name of a boyhood friend raises ``a host of remembered images... like a flock of disturbed pigeons''), Zen meets old men who confuse him with his father, who vanished mysteriously long ago. On an island used for mass burials, someone thinks he sees a vision, and a bag of heroin is misplaced. A new right-wing party is seizing power in the city, and Zen has the misfortune to fall for the estranged wife of the party leader. An old friend of his mother's, who's convinced that costumed ``Swamp-dwellers'' are invading her house, is far from credible, having been long judged unbalanced for a tale she tells of a missing daughter. Zen trails many lost people through twisting generations and winding waterways to face answers to questions he did not ask. Dibdin's mysteries are as nonlinear as the streets and canals of Venice; his prose is literate and seductive. (Jan.)

Michael Dibdin was born in England and raised in Northern Ireland. He attended Sussex University and the University of Alberta in Canada. He spent five years in Perugia, Italy, where he taught English at the local university. He went on to live in Oxford, England and Seattle, Washington. He was the author of eighteen novels, eleven of them in the popular Aurelio Zen series, including Ratking, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and Cabal, which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He died in 2007.