End Games: An Aurelio Zen Mystery - Hardcover

Dibdin, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375425217 ISBN 13: 9780375425219

Publisher: Pantheon Books, 2007

Synopsis

End Games: An Aurelio Zen Mystery

About this title

Review:

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. This is it -- the final Aurelio Zen novel, now that death has claimed the Italian copper’s talented creator, Michael Dibdin. End Games is a fitting finale to a remarkable series of books, in which Dibdin developed the character of his difficult but tenacious Italian policeman and, inter alia, gave readers a vivid and atmospheric picture of the whole of Italy in all its splendour, colour and corruption.

This last book transports Zen to far-flung Calabria for what she appears to be a by-the-numbers assignment. But in this close-mouthed, inhospitable place, Zen discovers that there is a worm at the heart of a community and secrets that reach back over centuries. A savage killing has taken place, and investigations are compromised by the presence of people from other countries in search of a buried treasure.

In the past, Dibdin ensured that Zen repeatedly came up against a wall of silence, but none more implacable than that he encounters here. As the detective slowly but surely peels away the layers of mystery and obfuscation, he is forced to confront the very basis of the concepts by which he has tried to maintain his career: honesty, a sense of justice and firm notions of right and wrong. As always with this writer, the sense of locale is conjured up with maximum vividness, and the final effect of reading the book that writes finis to the careers of both Aurelio Zen and the man who created him is twofold: we are grateful that this final entry is a distinguished one, but saddened that we will never again go down those mean Italian streets that Zen led us down – at least not with Michael Dibdin as our guide... --Barry Forshaw

Review:

"Brims with clever reveals, elegant imagery, elaborate word play, violent shocks, refined and ribald jokes. . . . Something different from the ordinary detective story."--"The Wall Street Journal" "A sterling example of why both Dibdin and Zen will be sorely missed on the crime fiction front."--"The Boston Globe" "Clever and exuberantly witty. . . . Captures . . . the Italian national character in all its unruly glory."--"The New York Times ""A terrific stylist, prolific and protean. . . . The story is a fitting conclusion to a career that ended too soon."--"The Seattle Times"

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0375425217
• ISBN 13: 9780375425219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 335