Customer Reviews

Medusa: A Novel

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If Michael's Dibdin's prior Aurelio Zen mystery, "And then You Die", was a bit flaccid, he makes amends - big time - in "Medusa" - a hard-hitting, old-fashioned tale of conspiracy, deceit, love, and betrayal. As with all of Dibdin's work, the prose is beautifully crafted and elegant, and if the pace tends to meander at times in starts and fits and back alleys, this is, after all, Italy. Zen, too, is back in top form, free of the distractions of a dying mother and a budding love affair, instead and thankfully fully committed to cracking a baffling and increasingly ominous mystery.

The savvy Dibdin weaves this complex thriller obscurely, starting not with this discovery of the mummified corpse in an abandoned military tunnel in Italy's northern Dolomite mountain range, but with a series of vignettes of middle-aged Italians disturbed in varying ways by the discovery. In fact, roughly forty pages have turned until Zen even shows up, poking around the abandoned cave with the Austrian spelunker who originally found the body. What could have passed as a decades old accident takes on more sinister dimensions when the corpse is literally whisked away in the night by shadowy government officials, hooking Zen in the ultimate cold case complicated by never knowing exactly who can be trusted.

With its well drawn characters, engaging storylines, and authoritative settings, "Medusa" will remind loyal fans just how much Michael Didbin, who passed away last year, will be missed. If there is fairness in literature, perhaps he will gain the readership posthumously this prolific author so richly deserved while living.

The last two books by Dibdin in this series are very prosaic (or prozakic) in their characterizations. One of the things that made the early stories so much fun was the detailed descriptions of regions of Italy and the people of each area that Zen was involved in. In this story Dibdin seems to be going through the motions more than anything else.

We just touch on the relationship between Zen and Gemma but don't really learn anything about their lives together. Neither do we get a better idea of what Zen's new position is all about. He seems to be a free-agent who will be called on from time to time and then left to his own devices during the rest of the time. He gets most of his information through old friend or by bluffing those in the bureaucracy.

It seems that Zen (and by this I mean Dibdin) has little or no respect for the 'new' government (read Burlesconi) and the changing attitude of the Italian public. Well, just because nothing ever happens in Italy isn't the reason it's boring, it's because the whole country is aging and living off it's heritage. If Italy didn't have all those beautiful old buildings and museums, there wouldn't be a reason to go there.

There are only two books left in the series and I hope Dibdin turned it around before he left us.

Zeb Kantrowitz