Vendetta
An Aurelio Zen Mystery
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4.1 • 21 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen, Michael Dibdin has given the mystery one of its most complex and compelling protagonists: a man wearily trying to enforce the law in a society where the law is constantly being bent. In this, the first novel he appears in, Zen himself has been assigned to do some law bending. Officials in a high government ministry want him to finger someone--anyone--for the murder of an eccentric billionaire, whose corrupt dealings enriched some of the most exalted figures in Italian politics.But 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. And that same killer, elusive, implacable, and deranged, may now be stalking Zen. Inexorable in its suspense, superbly atmospheric, Vendetta is further proof of Dibdin's mastery of the crime novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Corruption in high places, underworld skulduggery and a vendetta among mountainfolk are ingredients for murder in this literate, suspenseful thriller. An intruder guns down an eccentric Sardinian billionaire, his wife and two guests in his seemingly impregnable villa. Enter befuddled Venetian inspector Aurelio Zen, last encountered in Dibdin's Ratking. Zen, who has a perfunctory love life, a half-senile, bad-tempered mother and an intuitive faculty sometimes worthy of his name, now works for an Italian government ministry in Rome. He's dispatched to Sardinia to get the chief suspect, a politician's friend, off the hook. Two crazies want Zen rubbed out: a just-released convict whom he'd sent to jail years ago, and the killer, whose lyrical, half-mad ramblings punctuate the narrative--of course, the two could be the same person. Spinning a plot as convoluted as Sardinia's winding streets, Dibdin illuminates a deeply corrupted society and ultimately vindicates his hero, who outmaneuvers the supercops trying to silence him.
