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 ...

Karen and I on the sofa, Karen and I in the back seat of the BMW, Karen and I at the river, up the alley, down the garden, round the corner, in the pub. Our movements are furtive, frantic and compulsive. Our pleasures are brief and incomplete. Our frustrations are enormous. Because if you look closely at the background of every scene, you'll see Dennis.Dennis and Karen lead a pleasant life in North Oxford until the day one of their dinner guests seduces Karen in the kitche...

Florence,1855. "The English are dying too much," the city's police chief observes. And members of the foreign community in this quaint Italian backwater, both English and American, are indeed dying at an alarming rate and in an extraordinary variety of ingenious and horrible ways.With the local authorities out of their depth, the distinguished resident Robert Browning launches his own private investigation, aided and abetted by an expatriot Robert Booth. Unfortunately, their amateu...

When an advance scout for an American film company disappears, Aurelio Zen's most recent assignment in remote Calabria becomes anything but routine. Despite a savage attack that has scared the locals silent, Zen is determined to expose the truth. To make matters more complicated, a group of dangerous strangers, led by a rich, single-minded American have arrived to uncover another local mystery—buried treasure—and they will stop at nothing to achieve their goal. What ensues is a fiendishly ...

After a decomposed body is discovered in an abandoned military tunnel, Inspector Aurelio Zen travels north to the Italian Alps to investigate. At first glance, the death appears to have been an accident. But when Zen takes a closer look, a mysterious tattoo begins to tell a much more sinister tale, especially after the body is snatched from the morgue. As Zen races to discover the inner workings of a clandestine military organization named Medusa, he is reminded of just how lethal Italian ...

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...

In the latest installment in his critically acclaimed Italian mystery series, Michael Didbin sends Aurelio Zen to Italy’s culinary capital, Bologna, where he discovers that some cases are not quite what they appear to be.When the corpse of the shady Bologna industrialist who owns the local football team is found both shot and stabbed with a Parmesan knife, Aurelio Zen is summoned to oversee the investigation. Anxious for a break from his girlfriend, who attributes Zen’s slow recove...

'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...

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...

An Aurelio Zen NovelMichael Dibdin's overburdened Italian police inspector has been transferred to Naples, where the rule of law is so lax that a police station may double as a brothel. But this time, having alienated superiors with his impolitic zealousness in every previous posting, Zen is determined not to make waves.Too bad an American sailor (who may be neither American nor a sailor) knifes one of his opposite numbers in Naples's harbor, and some local...

'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. ...

'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...