WINNER OF THE CWA GOLD DAGGER'Tremendously exciting.' RUTH RENDELL'Energetic and genre-stretching.' GUARDIANAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYPolice Commissioner Aurelio Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. But from the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia to take over an explosive kidnapping case involving one of Italy's most...

'One of Dibdin's finest . . . Wonderful.' EVENING STANDARD'Energetically and meticulously written.' GUARDIANAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYAurelio Zen's final case brings him to remote town of Calabria, at the toe of Italy's boot, on what is supposed to be a routine assignment: the death of a scout for an American film company.But the case is complicated by a group of dangerous strangers who have arr...

'Unputdownable.' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH'A complete inversion of the standard detective genre.' GUARDIANAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYInspector Zen is back, but nobody's supposed to know it.After months in hospital recovering from a car-bomb attack, he is lying low under a false name at a beach resort on the Tuscan coast, waiting to testify in an imminent anti-Mafia trial. Zen has clear instructions: to si...

'Spellbinding . . . superb.' WASHINGTON POST'Emotionally gripping and defiantly original.' ITALIAN MYSTERIESAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYZen finally receives the order he has been dreading all his professional life: his next posting to Sicily.The gruesome discovery of an unidentified, decomposed corpse sealed in a railway wagon marks the beginning of Zen's most difficult and dangerous murder case. ...

'Pure pleasure.' Evening Standard'An absolute treat . . . wittily and slyly written.' Euro CrimeAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYWhen the corpse of the shady industrialist who owns the local football team is found both shot and stabbed, Inspector Aurelio Zen is called to Bologna to oversee the investigation. Recovering slowly from surgery, and fleeing an equally painful crisis in his personal life, Zen is onl...

'A maestro of crime writing.' SUNDAY TIMES'The closest thing he's yet written to an English whodunnit.' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKSAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYAurelio Zen has an unorthodox assignment: to release the jailed scion of an important wine-growing family who is accused of a brutal murder.Zen travels north to the quiet fields, autumnal skies and crumbling farmhouses of Piedmont, Italian wine c...

WINNDER OF THE CWA GOLD DAGGER'Wonderfully intricate.' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS'Heart-pounding . . . a terrifying tale of revenge.' MYSTERY NEWSAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYInspector Aurelio Zen has a problem: the impossible murder of an eccentric billionaire, recorded on the closed-circuit video of Oscar Burolo's top-security Sardinian fortress. Officials in a high government minist...

'A rollicking good tale.' INDEPENDENT'A first-rate mystery.' WASHINGTON POSTAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYAurelio Zen returns to his native Venice in an unofficial capacity, to investigate the disappearance of an American millionaire. But he is quickly reminded that, amid the hazy light and shifting waters of the lagoon, nothing is what it seems.As he is drawn deeper into the ambiguous mysteries sur...

'Dibdin's best book.' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS'Bawdly, suspenseful, and splendidly farcical.' ITALIAN MYSTERIESAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYInspector Zen has been posted to Naples in disgrace, where he is asked to oversee the clean-up of the city's corrupt authorities. Like the rest of Italy, Naples is concerned about its image and is trying to reform itself. Zen, however, finds that someone else is already ...

Winner of the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award, this chilling police procedural is a masterpiece of psychological suspense.Italian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen is dispatched to investigate the kidnapping of Ruggiero Miletti, a powerful Perugian industrialist. But nobody much wants Zen to succeed: not the local authorities, who view him as an interloper, and certainly not Miletti's children, who seem content to let the head of the family languish in th...

There can be no question that the contents of this book will prove extremely controversial. Many people will be deeply shocked by the nature of Watson's statement. Many will no doubt prefer to reject it rather than surrender the beliefs of a lifetime. Others will at least regret that two of the great mysteries of crime are finally solved... An extraordinary document comes to light which for fifty years had been held on deposit by the bankers of the deceased John Herbert Watson MD - better ...

'Escapism of a high order.' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY'A slyly intelligent page turner.' PUBLISHERS WEEKLYAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYWhen a group of Austrian cavers in the Italian Alps come across human remains at the bottom of a deep shaft, everyone assumes the death was accidental - until the still unidentified body is stolen from the morgue and the Defence Ministry puts a news blackout on the case. The who...