Italian detective Aurelio Zen is alive and recuperating quite nicely, thank you, in a seaside resort village on the Tuscan coast.
Actually, he’s in something akin to protective custody.
In the previous novel, “Blood Rain,” Zen was being chased by Italian mobsters, who try to hasten his demise by planting a bomb in his car. Zen has recently been released from a hospital, where he was treated for severe, almost fatal injuries.
But Italian authorities don’t want his whereabouts known to the mobsters, so they assign him a fake name and send him to a resort to rest and wait until he’s to appear as a surprise witness in an anti-Mafia trial in the United States.
The situation is not a happy one for Zen, who feels at a loss with no real work to do. All he can do is lie on the beach — fully clothed and shod — and make friends with an attractive divorcee who also frequents the beach.
By now he’s almost enjoying himself. Then one day, some stranger shows up and takes his assigned seat on the beach. Rather than raise a ruckus, he simply moves his place in the sun a few yards away, where he can still chat with his new lady friend.
So he’s a little surprised when he learns that the intruder who took his spot on the beach is quite dead with a bullet in his chest.
Soon there is another mysterious death, this time a man who takes over Zen’s seat on an airplane headed for the United States.
This means that the plane is diverted for an emergency stop at Keflavik Airport in Iceland, a stay that adds to the mystery and to the misery suffered by a man who has little affection for any piece of land that was never part of the Holy Roman Empire.
His travels leave him philosophical when he learns that his destination in the States is Los Angeles.
“Maybe Los Angeles wouldn’t be so bad after all, he thought. It sounded like a pleasant, old-fashioned sort of place, and at least the people would all be Catholics. Although by no means a committed believer, Zen preferred to be surrounded by his own sort. Protestants were an enigma to him, all high ideals one minute and ruthless expediency the next. You knew where you were in a Catholic culture: up to your neck in lies, evasions, impenetrable mysteries, double-dealing, back-stabbing and underhand intrigues of every kind,” Dibdin has his naive hero thinking as he dozes off on the plane.
It all leaves Zen wondering not only about his enemies among the mobsters, but whether there may be an enemy among his friends with the Italian police.
Dibdin tells his story with sly humor and adds new layers of intrigue and more than a hint of prospective romance. His ending sports both a surprise and yet a new look at the character of the charming but austere detective.
Dibdin is a native of England who now makes his home in Seattle. He is the author of 14 previous novels, half of which feature Aurelio Zen.
