Blood Rain
An Aurelio Zen Mystery
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Aurelio Zen—cynical and tough, yet worn down from years of law enforcement—has just been given the worst assignment he could imagine. He has been sent to the heart of hostile territory: Sicily, the ancient, beautiful island where blood has been known to flow like wine, and the distinction between the police and the criminals is a fine one. Even worse, he has been sent to spy on the elite anti-Mafia squad.The only thing that makes the job palatable—and takes his mind off routine details like the rotting body found in a remote train car—is that Zen's adopted daughter, Carla, is also in town. But life becomes precarious for Carla when she stumbles upon some information she'd be better off not knowing and befriends a local magistrate on the Mafia's most wanted list. What ensues is a breakneck plot of amazing complexity that culminates in a stunning finale. Blood Rain, emotionally gripping and defiantly original, is surely one of Dibdin's finest works.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The cynical Venetian inspector fears that his employers view his growing older as a liability when, in this seventh, involving Aurelio Zen mystery (after A Long Finish), they assign him to a lowly post within the Interior Ministry of Rome. Sent to Sicily to gather information on the Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia (or DIA, the Anti-Mafia squad), Zen can barely muster the interest to care about his apparent demotion. This case, however, proves to be the aging detective's most dangerous assignment yet, uniting him with a daughter he didn't know he had: Carla Arduini, who's stationed in Sicily as a DIA computer consultant and who proves a comforting companion in the course of Zen's investigation. After the decomposing corpse of a Limina crime-family member is found in an abandoned train car in Catania, Zen learns that Sicilians like to deliver their crucial messages through multi-entendres and murder. No one can be trusted, not even the DIA, and Zen is forced to rely solely on his own instincts, no matter how paranoid he may seem, if he wants to solve more than one murder and live to see the next day. Though Dibdin missteps when he devotes a significant portion of the novel to building and then abruptly dropping a major character, his manifold gifts as a storyteller are in evidence here, affirming his expertise in the genre.
