Tag: Italy

Day 384: Vendetta

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Cover for VendettaAurelio Zen is faced with a seemingly insoluble mystery in Vendetta, and the hapless detective falls into the solution, this time literally. Some government ministry officials assign him to the murder of an eccentric billionaire, Oscar Burolo, whose corrupt dealings have made many Italian politicians wealthy. The chief suspect is a friend of one of the politicians. They want Zen to find a murderer–just about anyone except the suspect will do–and if he has to frame someone, that’s fine, too.

The problem is that Burolo was killed on his seemingly impregnable estate in Sardinia, where every room is monitored by video. Burolo’s death is plainly visible on the cameras, but not his murderer.

Before Zen leaves for Sardinia, though, some odd things happen. He thinks someone may have been following him, and someone has been in his house. A criminal he put away has just been released from jail, and a magistrate has been slain, but he sees no connection between these two incidents. It takes awhile, but Zen figures out that someone is stalking him. His growing relationship with his coworker Tania is also complicated by his being forced to go out of town.

On the scene of the crime, Zen finds an odd care-taking couple and learns that the chief suspect was probably not the murderer. Everyone that was on the scene was killed with a shotgun, and no one else appears to have been in that part of the house. Yet, the estate’s safeguards make it next to impossible for someone to have sneaked in from the outside, it appears.

In his bumbling way, Zen remains incorruptible while managing to stumble into a solution of the crime that makes everyone happy. Dibdin’s mysteries always cynically expose corruption in the Italian government. Zen is a somewhat befuddled detective, nattily dressed, and Dibdin takes great pleasure in occasionally covering his impeccable detective with muck. Vendetta is no exception. Zen’s romances and his difficult relationship with his nearly senile mother are important components of the series, which is occasionally funny and furnishes a clever puzzle to work out.

Day 368: Dead Lagoon

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Cover for Dead LagoonDead Lagoon is the most atmospheric of the Aurelio Zen mysteries I have read. In the novel, Zen returns to his home town of Venice, ostensibly to look into the “haunting” of the Contessa Zulian, his mother’s old employer, who is convinced that costumed “swamp dwellers” are invading her home. The contessa has long ago been deemed batty because of a tale she has been telling for years about a missing daughter. Although Zen has hitherto been incorruptible, he is actually there to work on the case of a missing wealthy American businessman, being paid under the table by the businessman’s family.

As Zen wanders or boats through the misty winter setting of Venice, visiting places he knew in his youth, he keeps stumbling over “ghosts,” some from his own past, and some actual dead bodies. A fisherman who spotted a ghost on the Isle of the Dead is drowned, then a crooked cop, head of the Venice drug squad, is found smothered in a sewer. In the search for the ghost on the cemetery island, an unexplained skeleton is found.

Zen’s investigation leads to a string of discoveries, of dishonest police, drug smuggling, and ambitious local politicians. His biggest discovery, though, is about his own family, including that nothing is what he thought it was.

I think what makes this Aurelio Zen book stand out is its depiction of Venice. The plot itself is rather disjointed and difficult to explain. Zen is able to solve both cases, but some readers have expressed frustration about the conclusion.

Day 354: Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance

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Cover for Worldly GoodsWorldly Goods promises a new look at the European Renaissance from a different point of view. Lisa Jardine, a professor of English at the University of London, proposes an interpretation of the period in terms of the growth of commerce and a new consumerism and multiculturalism.

However, the information offered does not seem new. Rulers and wealthy men have always been conspicuous consumers. Jardine attempts, for example, to turn around our view of the flowering of art as merely a series of demonstrations of the wealth of patrons who commissioned the works, a sort of competition to show who is most wealthy or powerful. But simply providing examples of patrons who specified expensive materials or the inclusion of their goods in pictures doesn’t prove this point.

Jardine does a better job of showing how the development of printing made the exchange of ideas easier, thus affecting the advances in many different fields, including the arts and the sciences. However, her argument that the policy decisions of the period were all driven by the dictates of commerce is taking things too far, I think.

The book is well written and lively. It does not back up its assertions with footnotes or a bibliography, however, indicating that it is written for the general public but frustrating those who would like to look further. At some point, I felt that the examples were becoming too repetitive and no new points were being made. For example, Chapter Three is about the proliferation of books and printing, but Jardine continues to make the same points about printing and the sharing of scientific and technical information repeatedly throughout the rest of the book.

Although the history provides an interesting discussion of commerce during the Renaissance, it is oversold as a complete history of the period.

Day 320: The Malice of Fortune

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Cover for The Malice of FortuneThe Malice of Fortune follows a current trend of mystery fiction to use actual historical people as detectives. In this case, the novel is set in 16th century Italy, and the historical detective is Niccolò Machiavelli, assisted at times by Leonardo da Vinci.

It is 1502 in the Papal States of Italy, and the infamous Pope Alexander VI, the former Rodrigo Borgia, has received word of his beloved son Juan, who was murdered years before. A woman was found butchered in Imola, and with her body was an amulet Juan always kept with him. The Pope summons the courtesan Damiata, whom he suspects of complicity in Juan’s death, and takes her little son hostage while he dispatches her to investigate.

In Imola, Damiata finds that someone has been murdering and butchering women and then leaving quarters of their bodies around the city. When she travels out to the scene of the latest discovery, she finds that Juan’s brother, the dangerous Duke Cesare (nicknamed Valentino) Borgia, has Leonardo da Vinci on the scene as his investigator. Da Vinci thinks that the killer is playing a game by constructing puzzles for him. At the scene some masked men provide an additional clue by fleeing the investigators.

Damiata also meets Niccolò Machiavelli, who is in town representing the city of Florence, which is afraid that Duke Valentino and his condottieri, or mercenaries, are planning to attack the city. Damiata suspects one of the three condottieri generals of being the murderer, but she does not know which one.

Machiavelli provides a different insight into the murderer. He has made a study of what he calls “the necessity” for each man–what drives him–and he begins trying to discover the murderer’s necessity. Machiavelli and Damiata team up to find the murderer.

This novel has interesting characters and situations, but at some point I felt as if the characters are chasing around too much with little result. Instead of building suspense, the plot seems unplanned and disorganized.

Michael Ennis is a historian, and the historical background is convincing and seems accurate. Compared to his previous novel about medieval Italy, The Duchess of Milan, a straight historical fiction novel about the powerful d’Este family, The Malice of Fortune is a little disappointing.

Day 317: Medusa

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Cover for MedusaMedusa is the first Aurelio Zen mystery I read after seeing the series on Masterpiece Mystery!, and I found it to be well written and entertaining.

Aurelio Zen is sent north to the Italian Alps, an area on the far reaches of the known universe as far as he is concerned, because a decomposed body of a man was found in a disused military tunnel. The body has a mysterious tattoo, which could be important, but the corpse disappears from the morgue overnight.

Once the body is identified, it turns out to belong to a soldier who supposedly died in a plane crash 30 years ago. It gradually becomes clear that this mystery has to do with events during or just after World War II. To his dismay, the dapper Zen finds himself clambering around in the cave with the Austrian spelunker who discovered the body.

The narrative alternates between Zen’s attempts to unravel a tangle of clues and the thoughts of some older men who know more about what is going on. It appears that someone is trying to protect a secret, and the secret may have to do with a clandestine group that exists within the army.

As always, Zen’s cynicism about the powers that be in the government and the police force (and in this case, the army) is amusing, and Dibdin seems to get a special pleasure from subjecting the finely dressed detective to scenes where he has to climb around in wet, dirty places.

Day 248: A Long Finish

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Cover for A Long FinishAurelio Zen’s assignment in A Long Finish reflects the corruption in the Italian police force and government that is always being pointed out in these books. Zen is assigned to go to Alba not by his superiors but by a famous movie producer. The producer wants him to investigate the murder of Aldo Vincenzo, a noted winemaker–more importantly, to free Vincenzo’s son Manlio so he can get the grape harvest in and oversee the production of the wine. Vincenzo was found stabbed in his own vineyards with his genitals removed. The producer is a wine connoisseur who wants to make sure this year’s vintage isn’t wasted.

Zen finds himself in a dreamy, unfocused state, having nightmares because of several successive personal losses. Unfortunately, I’ve read the Aurelio Zen novels in an entirely random order, so I was confused about the sequence of the events in his personal life. Zen also has a severe cold, and someone is leaving him anonymous phone messages.

The first scene in the book, however, was of the murder, so the readers know that just before his death, Vincenzo encountered a trespassing truffle hunter. But which person was it? The truth may lie 40 years in the past, as indicated by the method of Vincenzo’s death, with echoes of partisan fighting during World War II, or maybe that is just a ruse.

I may be tiring a little of Aurelio Zen. I couldn’t put my finger on anything definite, but throughout this novel I got the impression that Dibdin is just trifling with his readers.

Day 238: And Then You Die

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Cover for And Then You DieI started reading Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series after seeing the mysteries about the hapless Italian detective on Masterpiece Mystery. In And Then You Die, Zen is more hapless than usual. I had some problems reading this book because it is apparently a sequel to a book I had not read, and it requires some knowledge of the previous book. I felt this one boiled down to a series of unfocused mishaps.

At the beginning of the novel, Zen is staying under cover in a beach community waiting to be a witness against the Mafia, who apparently tried to kill him in the previous book. He has been a long time recovering from the murder attempt and has not been home for a year.

At the beach, families have reserved places, and someone has occupied the place that goes with his apartment, so he takes another and proceeds to carry on a flirtation with the woman across from him, Gemma. Later on, he finds out the man in his place is dead.

His minders move him, saying that the dead man was killed in mistake for him. Then the plan changes and they put him on a plane to the U.S. to testify there. But the plane has to force land in Iceland after he changes seats and the man who takes his seat dies.

It’s obvious that someone is trying to kill Zen throughout the book, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. I don’t know whether this is Dibdin’s idea of humor or not, but generally Zen is a little sharper than this. Moreover, the episode in Iceland is decidedly odd. In all, the plot seemed very unfocused, with Zen wandering all over the place. I honestly felt as if Dibdin was not putting much effort into this novel.