Friday, October 05

Book: "End Games" Another Italian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen Mystery--Michael Dibdin

The ANNOTICO Report

"End Games" features the capable and circumspect Italian police commissioner Aurelio Zen, whom we have come to know over a whole series of novels.

This installment finds the peripatetic Zen (too expert and honest to stay long in any one city, it seems) posted to remote Calabria, a southern region at the toe of Italy's "boot," where the natives are secretive and the weather explosive.

A visiting American has been killed in a grotesque ritual -- but then it seems that he was not American after all, but Calabrian. As Zen moves in ways both straightforward and roundabout to capture a killer, he discovers a variety of distinctive characters entwined in the dead man's fate: a dot-com gaming entrepreneur, his Vietnamese man- Friday fixer, a sybaritic Italian film director, a beautiful chameleon of a female police-operative.

"End Games" brims with clever reversals, elegant imagery, elaborate word play, violent shocks, refined and ribald jokes, verbal mimicry, and memorable set pieces.....

Bookmarks

Wall Street Journal

Reviewed by Tom Nolan 

October 5, 2007

END GAMES
By Michael Dibdin
(Pantheon, 335 pages, $23.95)

"End Games" features the capable and circumspect Italian police commissioner Aurelio Zen, whom we have come to know over a whole series of novels. Michael Dibdin's text, as usual, evokes not so much the terse action scenes of hardboiled masters as the word-drunk prose of such language-besotted authors as Anthony Burgess, Vladimir Nabokov and Lawrence Durrell.

This installment finds the peripatetic Zen (too expert and honest to stay long in any one city, it seems) posted to remote Calabria, a southern region at the toe of Italy's "boot," where the natives are secretive and the weather explosive. A visiting American has been killed in a grotesque ritual -- but then it seems that he was not American after all, but Calabrian. As Zen moves in ways both straightforward and roundabout to capture a killer, he discovers a variety of distinctive characters entwined in the dead man's fate: a dot-com gaming entrepreneur, his Vietnamese man- Friday fixer, a sybaritic Italian film director, a beautiful chameleon of a female police-operative.

"End Games" brims with clever reversals, elegant imagery, elaborate word play, violent shocks, refined and ribald jokes, verbal mimicry, and memorable set pieces.....

Alas, "End Games" is aptly titled, for Michael Dibdin died in March, in Seattle, at the age of 60. He was a stellar example of the sort of formidable talent who may always take shelter within the accommodating genre of crime fiction. The next time you hear a snob speak condescendingly of the detective story, tell them to go take a hike -- or to read a Dibdin novel.

 

The ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:

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Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net