Dead Lagoon - (Aurelio Zen Mystery) by Michael Dibdin (Paperback)

About the Book

Dibdin gives readers a deliciously creepy new novel featuring the urbane and skeptical Aurelio Zen. In this new mystery, Zen returns to his native Venice, searching for a missing American millionaire and encountering an assortment of corpses--including a suspiciously new skeleton that surfaces on the Isle of the Dead.

Book Synopsis

Among the emerging generation of crime writers, none is as stylish and intelligent as Michael Dibdin, who, in Dead Lagoon, gives us a deliciously creepy new novel featuring the urbane and skeptical Aurelio Zen, a detective whose unenviable task it is to combat crime in a country where today's superiors may be tomorrow's defendants.Zen returns to his native Venice. He is searching for the ghostly tormentors of a half-demented contessa and a vanished American millionaire whose family is paying Zen under the table to determine his whereabouts-dead or alive. But he keeps stumbling over corpses that are distressingly concrete: from the crooked cop found drowned in one of the city's noisome "black wells" to a brand-new skeleton that surfaces on the Isle of the Dead. The result is a mystery rich in character and deduction, and intensely informed about the history, politics, and manners of its Venetian setting.

Review Quotes

"Surprisingly moving . . . a first-rate mystery and a fine novel."--Washington Post Book World"Dibdin's plot is as elegantly elaborate as the crisscrossing canals of Venice."--Newsday"The author has transcended his own superb craftsmanship by working [two] story lines into a structure of pure steel, and by making it the foundation of a serious study of modern-day Venice."--The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Michael Dibdin was born in England and raised in Northern Ireland. He attended Sussex University and the University of Alberta in Canada. He spent five years in Perugia, Italy, where he taught English at the local university. He went on to live in Oxford, England and Seattle, Washington. He was the author of eighteen novels, eleven of them in the popular Aurelio Zen series, including Ratking, which won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger, and Cabal, which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He died in 2007.