See Photos, Four Michael Dibdin Aurelio Zen Mysteries. See individual descriptions below.. I have owned the books from new
Ratking
9780571154210
See Photos, a clean but tanned book in very good condition
Reprint 1991 Faber & Faber
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Followed by Vendetta
Ratking is a 1988 novel by Michael Dibdin, and is the first book in the popular Aurelio Zen series, introducing readers to the Italian police commissario's morally shady world. On publication it won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for fiction.
Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. From the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome counting paperclips, to which he has been exiled through political fallout from the Aldo Moro kidnapping and murder, he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia. Unbeknownst to him, favours have been called in and words have been whispered into ears. He is to take over a kidnapping case involving one of Italy's most powerful families, with control of a business empire at stake. The missing head of the family is a big benefactor of one of Italy's main political parties and pressure is being applied. Zen contends with local power politics and troubled relationships with his mother and girlfriend, while employing some distinctly unorthodox methods and skirting the borderline of the permissible in a race to get results before he is removed from the case through political pressure.
Vendetta
9780571161652
See Photos, a clean but tanned book in very good condition
Reprint 1991 Faber & Faber
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Preceded by Ratking
Followed by Cabal
Vendetta is a 1990 novel by Michael Dibdin, and is the second book in the popular Aurelio Zen series.
Zen has earned a return to the fold of actual police work, but now officials in a high government ministry are desperate to finger someone—anyone—for the murder of an eccentric billionaire, whose corrupt dealings have enriched some of the most exalted figures in Italian politics. However, 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.
Zen grapples, in his idiosyncratic fashion, with this apparent "locked door" mystery by launching an ill-advised solo undercover investigation, amongst the fallout from which he is confronted by an almost forgotten face from the past, who now stalks him with vengeful intent.
Dead Lagoon
9780571173471
1995 First Edition Faber & Faber Paperback
See Photos, a clean but tanned book in good condition with a worn and creased cover but internally clean
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Preceded by Cabal
Followed by Cosi Fan Tutti
Dead Lagoon is a 1994 novel by Michael Dibdin and is the fourth in his Aurelio Zen series.
It was published by Faber & Faber in the UK and by Pantheon Books the following year in the US.
Moonlighting, Italian police detective Zen had arranged a winter posting to his run-down home city of Venice. This is in order to investigate the disappearance of American millionaire Ivan Durridge (born in Yugoslavia as Durič) on behalf of his American ex-girlfriend. He needs the extra money to set up home with his new girlfriend Tania in Rome with room for his ageing mother.
At a time when people in authority all over Italy are being prosecuted for corruption, there is a justified suspicion that Enzo Gavagnin, the head of the local Drugs Squad, is implicated. Zen therefore looks for a different case to explain his presence in Venice. He finds it in the complaints of the half crazy countess Ada Zulian that intruders are breaking into her mouldering palazzo, where his mother used to do the cleaning when he was a child. The culprits are her two nephews, anxious to develop a piece of advantageous property that the countess owns. Zen outwits them and is then outwitted by Ada Zulian. She had only wanted their attendance on her needs in old age and now refuses to prosecute them.
Zen is staying at his family's old flat in the Cannaregio district, which has been cleaned up for him by his mother's friend Rosalba. At a family dinner he meets Rosalba's daughter Cristiana Morosini and soon starts an affair with her. Cristiana is the estranged wife of Dal Maschio, leader of the secessionist party Nuova Repubblica Veneta, which has risen in the wake of the Liga Nord and now looks close to success in the coming elections. For reasons of expediency, Cristiana must still appear with her husband on political occasions, however.
The discovery of Gavagnin's body in a cesspit, where he has been drowned after torture, allows Zen to stay on in the city after the successful conclusion of the Zulian case. Following up clues, he finds the skeleton of the missing Durridge on the cemetery island of Sant' Ariano, where it had been dropped from a helicopter. Flushed with success, Zen is planning to move to Venice permanently and set up house with Cristiana when a series of revelations following one after the other destroys his complacency.
He is visited by Maschio, who confesses to having helped carry out the kidnapping of Durridge as a political favour to colleagues in newly independent Croatia. The likelihood of Maschio becoming the new mayor of Venice makes him untouchable and, besides, he has engineered Zen's expulsion in disgrace from Venice. In the meantime he had been using Cristiana to keep an eye on Zen. In revenge Zen tries to turn Maschio's lieutenant Tomasso Saoner against him on the strength of their childhood friendship but only succeeds in driving his former schoolfellow to suicide.
In the final hours, older mysteries dating from World War II are solved. Ada's sanity had first been unhinged by the disappearance of her daughter Rosetta at that period. It now appears that Rosetta had committed suicide and that a Fascist neighbour had buried the body and arranged for the escape of the Jewish Rosa Coin under Rosetta's identity in order to save himself. Then, just as Zen is leaving, an old friend of his father Angelo – who had been reported as killed while fighting in Russia – tells Zen that he had met Angelo in Poland two years before. His father had deserted, stayed behind there and married again.
Thoroughly disillusioned, Zen continues to the train station and, when asked for directions, replies, “I'm sorry, I’m a stranger here myself”.
Back to Bologna
9780571227761
2005 1st Edition Faber & Faber
See Photos, a clean but tanned airport size book, that was used and abused on holiday, the cover and the first 40 or so pages show water damage in the top right hand corner, and a turned page corner, but it is still a clean readable book
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Preceded by Medusa
Followed by End Games
Back to Bologna is a 2005 novel by Michael Dibdin, and is the tenth entry in the popular Aurelio Zen series.
Zen, an Italian police detective, is on sick leave after a stomach operation and is feeling a shadow of himself. His relationship with his partner, Gemma, is also not going well. She is about to leave for Bologna to meet her son who has something important to tell her.
Meanwhile, Zen is recalled to duty and is sent to be the liaison officer for a high-profile murder investigation - in Bologna – where the local football team owner has been shot, as well as stabbed with a Parmesan knife.
Whilst in Bologna, Gemma manages to get tickets to watch a live cook-off between local academic celebrity Edgardo Ugo and singing TV chef Romano Rinaldi, 'Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta', provoked by Ugo suggesting, in a newspaper article, that Lo Chef can't cook. A series of coincidences leads to Zen being arrested when Ugo is found shot in the wake of the hilariously disastrous event.
The other main characters include a couple of flatmates – a student of Ugo's and a rich kid who fancies himself an 'Ultra' football fan – and the student's illegal immigrant girlfriend, who calls herself Princess Flavia of Ruritania, as well as the world's worst private detective, who fancies himself a Chandleresque Private Eye.
This is Zen at the centre of a black comedy.