End Games
Atheists are such bores. They talk about God all the time.
- Michael Dibdin, "End Games"
The final Aurelio Zen novel from Michael Dibdin, the Godfather of Crime
Aurelio Zen is posted to remote Calabria, at the toe of the Italian boot. And beneath the surface of a tight-knit, traditional community he discovers that violent forces are at work. There has been a brutal murder. Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth. But his mission is complicated by another secret which has drawn strangers from the other side of the world - a hunt for buried treasure launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing his bizarre and deadly obsession.
Guardian review of Michael Dibdin's posthumously published, final Aurelio Zen book, "End Games":
"Dibdin's satirical swipes at US fundamentalist Christians, moronic Californian software millionaires and pretentious Italian film directors are a delight - as are Zen's droll remarks about the false ascendancy of the tomato in Italian cooking. As usual, Dibdin's ability to look below the surface of a particular region's social and political structure is as acute as his descriptions of the beautiful, forbidding landscape and the echoing alleys and piazzas of the city to which Zen has been sent. The violence is as brutal as ever."
Other reviews: Telegraph | Times Online | Publishers Weekly |
Michael Dibdin died earlier this year. *sniff* Back in June, Mark Lawson, also at the Guardian, wrote:
"The shadow of mortality and mourning that is a basic requirement of mysteries is doubled in the case of End Games, Michael Dibdin's 11th novel about the Italian cop Aurelio Zen, because the advance copies began to circulate just after the news of the writer's death on March 30, nine days after his 60th birthday.
"Whatever state Zen is in on the final page of End Games, he has no chance of surviving this book. The tying up of ends in the final chapter will not, for most readers, achieve the catharsis that is one of the reasons such stories have appeal. The author's sudden absence haunts us far past the last page."
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The NY Times picks Martin Cruz Smith's latest Arkady Renko novel, "Stalin's Ghost", which is set in contemporary Russia, as a book of the times.
...and I seem to be getting back into crime novels again. In the last couple of weeks, I bought:
- "Stalin's Ghost", Martin Cruz Smith
- "Her Last Call to Louis MacNeice", Ken Bruen
- "The Bobby Gold Stories", Anthony Bourdain
- "The Broken Shore", Peter Temple
- "Seeking Whom He May Devour", Fred Vargas