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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The opening of a great series, October 16, 2000
Michael Dibdin is a genre writer of many styles. He has written stand alone thrillers, The Tryst and Dark Spectre, parodies, The Last Sherlock Homes Story and The Dying of the Light, and one of the great modern detective series - the Aurelio Zen novels. This is the first novel in that series. Critically applauded at the time of original publication (and winner of the British CWA Gold Dagger Award for crime novel of the year) it perhaps deserves reappraisal in the light of the other books in the series.The Zen novels take place around Italy, this in Perugia. Zen is seconded there from Rome, following political pressure being placed on his superiors. The pressure is brought because an important businessman has been kidnapped, and in the many months he has been missing the local police seem to be having trouble finding the kidnappers. Zen's imposition is resented by locals, and his intervention used by members of the businessman's family, and the local prosecutors. In its favour the novel has a strong sense of place, Perugia being well evoked; and wonderful characterisation. Zen is one of the great fictional detectives. He starts here a man on the shelf. Having been sidelined during a kidnapping investigation many years before, he has been out of operative duty for some time. He is not quite as he seems, not wholly corrupt, a man au fait with the politics of the police force. There are many contradictions in his character. Also, Zen is an outsider. He is from Venice, the wrong part of the country for some. Zen's opening scene in the novel says much of his character. As a robbery takes place on a train, he sits by and watches. He is berated by his fellow passengers, then at the next station leaves the train to make some phone calls. The reader is never completely sure where they stand with Zen. The sketchy family background hinted at in this novel is fleshed out in later novels. However, the joy in this novel is the strength of the minor characters. The Miletti family (the kidnapped man's children) and their partners are well drawn. The Marxist prosecutor is a wonderful character. Partly jealous at the Miletti fortune, partly zealous to perform his job well, but never above playing political games. Characterisation is brought out through small actions, minor insults. Sometimes Dibdin tells the reader, rather than showing (e.g. the treatment of Ivy Cook at an early family dinner). These glitches are less pronounced in later novels in the series. The plotting is sound, the novel part puzzle, part atmospheric. It is an enjoyable work. It is in the subsequent novels in the series where plotting is tightened, and characterisation strengthened, together with the increasing familiarity with the principal and his regular support, that Dibdin's strengths as a writer really show. If you enjoyed Ratking try Dibdin's Cabal or Vendetta, or the Dalziel and Pascoe series of novels of Reginald Hill (Particularly Deadheads, Bones and Silence, or A Killing Kindness) or Ian Rankin's Mortal Causes or The Black Book (two Rebus novels).
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Do start here!, June 7, 2004
First in Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series.A terrific start to an extremely well-written detective series, set in various places in Italy (this one in Perugia). It is a very good idea to start at the beginning and read the series in order, unless you don't mind obtaining mosaic-like insights into the motivations, psychology and personal relationships of the almost-but-not-quite 'anti-hero' Zen. The outcomes of previous cases are discussed in subsequent books, which could prove to spoil earlier ones for a non-sequential reader. Dibdin conveys the Italian settings well - you can almost feel yourself walking alongside Zen through the piazzas of Rome and the precipitous streets of Perugia. Zen is not another Commissario Brunetti (Donna Leon's equally as engaging Venetian detective). Zen's psychology is much darker, his demons more active, his personality more brittle and his relationships more fragile. Above all, his morality is more able to cope with (and indulge in) matters not always just 'shady', but sometimes downright illegal. Dibdin does successfully capture, however, the Italian body politic with both its unbending public bureaucracy and more flexible private state. For an intelligent police procedural, with well-drawn characters, and a wonderful sense of place, I heartily recommend Ratking as a wonderful series opener.
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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Matryoshka Mystery, August 8, 2000
Instead of those wooden dolls that nest one inside the other, Michael Dibdin creates a story line, which offers not only a variety of possible solutions, but also an unknown number of suspects and motives. And just like the dolls I mention, until you open the final one, you don't know how many there are, or what finally lies in the nest's core.I have read the bookends of the Aurelio Zen series by this talented Author, firstly his newest "Blood Rain", and the inaugural book in the series "Ratking". Although I cannot yet comment on the installments that reside between these two books, unlike some ongoing character based novels, the last was as good as the first. One of Mr. Dibdin's great talents is his ability to sustain the unknown, or the uncertainty of the solution to his books to the very end. He does not use crude blind alleys or other cliché slights of hand with his pen, rather he brings the reader along with Aurelio, seeing what he sees, but not limiting the reader to only what the Inspector may feel. There is no blatant misdirection, which by definition fools no one, Mr. Dibdin is much more subtle. In "Ratking" he constructs a Gordian Knot, of rat tails/tales, and unlike the Ratking the book describes, he unravels his construct with a self deprecating flair. Unlike other Authors he does not throw open a curtain and hope for the expected gasp, he entertains throughout his work. His novels are wonderfully complete, and amazingly brief. His stories are not based on one clever thought that is then pulled and stretched to novel length. His stories are finished, and written with a disciplined hand. This Author has no need for gimmicks; he is a Master with a pen, a wordsmith of the first order.
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