End games An Aurelio Zen mystery

DONNA LEON has staked out Venice, Magdalen Nabb knows every narrow street in Florence, and Andrea Camilleri holds Sicily in the palm of his hand. But only Michael Dibdin, in the clever and exuberantly witty police procedurals he created for a dyspeptic cop named Aurelio Zen, tried to wrap his arms around the whole of Italy. Braving his way province by province - from the mountains of Alto Adige (in "Medusa") to the caves of Sardinia (in "Vendetta") - the British-born author produced crime stories that capture the idiosyncratic essence of each region while contributing to a dynamic study of the Italian national character in all its unruly glory. When he died last spring, Dibdin was well along in this ambitious deconstruction process, with END GAMES (Pantheon, $23.95), the last Zen novel, providing a key piece in the jigsaw design of the series. The story is set in the remote and rugged hill towns of Calabria, a southern region known to the French as "la Calabre sauvage" and one that Zen views with wary amusement - partly because he's filling in for a provincial chief of police who has shot himself in the foot while cleaning his pistol. But when an American lawyer working for a shady Hollywood film company is kidnapped and then killed, and when it later comes to light that the victim was actually a Calabrian, born into the oldest and richest family in the area, Zen begins to get a sense of a more cunning criminal mentality at work behind the transparently thuggish manner of the locals. Dibdin is outrageously funny, as always, in conveying Zen's snobby Venetian attitude toward his regional postings. Here, he heaps scorn on the tomato-based cuisine ("roba del sud," his mother would have dismissed it - "southern stuff"), the unrefined architecture (the offensive town church is declared "a modern monstrosity with Romanesque pretensions") and the rude local dialect ("incomprehensible" even to native Italians). More pointedly, Zen is "sick to death of this romantic mystique of the south" and "fed up with hearing how crime down here is ineradicable because it feeds off an unfathomable collective tradition of blood, honor and tragedy." Even as he allows Zen to rail against the xenophobic customs of this cruel and dangerous place, Dibdin registers respect for the games of survival adopted by the fatalistic populace as a way of life. And while satire invariably triumphs over sentiment when his colorful Calabrian lowlifes are joined in their criminal games by the ruthless Americans from the film company, Dibdin also gives his detective Zen-like moments of enlightenment into the soul of the region. "It depresses me," he tells a friend, responding to "the sense of a generalized and ineradicable sadness about the place." But in the end, he makes peace with this foreign land before he leaves for home. Michael Harvey, one of the originators and currently an executive producer of the addictive TV-documentary crime show "Cold case Files," applies his inside expertise shrewdly in his first novel, THE CHICAGO WAY (Knopf, $23.95). Working from a tight plot about an old rape case that heats up after the detective who tries to reopen it is murdered, Harvey writes his best when he gets up close to a subject, as he does in a shocker of a scene in a police warehouse stuffed with boxes of evidence from unsolved rape cases. The efficiency of his cinematic style also suits the brisk, animated shots of Chicago that give the story both grit and authenticity. But Harvey has only mixed success in adapting his up-to-date material to the vintage noir style he aims to emulate. His sleuth, a young private eye named Michael Kelly, initially has trouble finding his narrative groove and sounds a bit like Dick Powell doing a voice-over. He loosens up once the investigation into the cover-up of a serial rapist begins to get interesting; all the same, certain procedural devices just don't wash. In classic P.I. novels, the hero tricks the cops and leans on a reporter pal to pick up information. Here, the ex-cop Kelly is so friendly with the fuzz they issue him invitations to crime scenes and autopsies and work up DNA evidence for him in the forensic lab. Nice try, but I don't think so. Joe Sandilands, the Scotland Yard detective who served so honorably in Barbara Cleverly's historical mysteries set in India, reveals another aspect of his sensitive nature in TUG OF WAR (Carroll & Graf, $24.95). The year is 1926, and Sandilands has been dispatched to Reims, France, to determine the identity of a mute, shell-shocked World War I veteran whose sad condition (and sizable military pension) has attracted multiple claims. Listening to the heartbreaking war stories of the major applicants, including the widow of a Champagne vintner who disappeared on the battlefield of Chemin des Dames "in the middle of the corpse-strewn Marne," is enough to rattle the detective, who fought at Passchendaele. But despite her mastery at vivid scene-setting, Cleverly never loses sight of the historical puzzle that is central to her story. Simply put, it's a stunner. There's usually an element of the supernatural - or at least, the macabre - in Fred Vargas's insanely imaginative procedurals featuring Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Although Adamsberg is commissaire of the prestigious Serious Crime Squad in Paris, his messy personal life has a way of taking over his criminal investigations. This is precisely what happens in WASH THIS BLOOD CLEAN FROM MY HAND (Penguin, paper, $14) when an eventful trip to Canada leads him to be hunted for murder on two continents. But one doesn't read for logic in this novel (which maintains its loopy quality in Sian Reynolds's translation from the French); one reads to be amazed by the fantastic twists in the bizarre plot about a long-dead serial killer who seems to be pursuing his quarry from the grave. One reads as well to be delighted by the literary grace notes. Even when the formal symbolism gets a bit thick, who can resist a detective who cracks a case by researching the etymology of a killer's name? Michael Dibdin Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels capture regional Italy - and the gloriously unruly national character.

The wry 11th and final Insp. Aurelio Zen mystery (after 2006's Back to Bologna) will leave the series' many fans in renewed mourning for Gold Dagger-winner Dibdin (1947-2007). When the corpse of American attorney Peter Newman is discovered in Calabria after an apparent botched kidnapping, Zen finds himself probing the rumor that Newman was not only born in Italy but heir to a family of southern Italian landowners. The detective must sort out other possible motives for the crime, including the dead man's work for an eccentric Hollywood producer hoping to outdo Mel Gibson with a film based on the Book of Revelations. The writing occasionally soars ("There is a unique flavor of melancholy to remote railway stations during the long intervals between the arrival and departure of trains"), and Zen's apt observations of his country's foibles and the unromantic portrayal of Calabria help to balance the sometimes brutal plot. This quirky series will be missed. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The dead man parked his car at the edge of the town, beside a crumbling wall marking the bounds of a rock--gashed wasteland of crippled oaks and dusty scrub whose ownership had been the subject of litigation for more than three decades, and which had gradually turned into an unofficial rubbish tip for the local population. The arrival of the gleaming, silver--grey Lancia was noted by several pairs of eyes, and soon known to everyone in the town, but despite the fact that the luxury saloon was left unguarded and unlocked, no attempt was made to interfere with it, because the driver was a dead man. The only ones to see him close to were three boys, aged between five and ten, who had been acting out a boar hunt in the dense shrubbery under the cliff face. The five--year--old, who was the prey, had just been captured and was about to be dispatched when a man appeared on the path just a few metres away. He was in his fifties or early sixties, of medium stature, with pale skin and a shock of hair that was profuse and solidly black. He wore a black suit of some cheap synthetic fabric, and a wide collar, almost clerical, but matte and black, encircled his neck. From it, beneath the throat, hung a large metal crucifix. The man's chest and feet were bare. He trudged silently up the steep path towards the old town, looking down at the ground in front of him, and showed no sign of having seen the trio of onlookers. As soon as he was out of sight the two younger boys were all for following him, scared but daring each other not to be. Sabatino, the eldest, put paid to that idea with a single jerk of the head. No one had confided in him about this event, but the community in which they all lived was a plangent sounding board when it came to news that might affect its members. Sabatino -hadn't heard the primary note that must have been struck somewhere, but he had un-consciously absorbed the secondary vibrations resonating in other parts of that complex instrument. "Danger!" they had whispered. "Lie low, keep away, know nothing." Discarding his role as the renowned and fearless hunter of wild boar for that of the responsible senior child, he rounded up his friend Francesco and the other boy and led them down a side path back to the safety of the town. The sole witness to what happened next was a figure surveying the scene through binoculars from a ridge about a kilometre away on the other side of the valley. The dead man followed the track until it rose above the last remaining trees and ceased to be a rough line of beaten earth and scruffy grass, to become a stony ramp hewn out of the cliff face and deeply rutted by the abrasive force of ancient iron--rimmed cartwheels. By now il morto was clearly suffering, but he struggled on, pausing frequently to gasp for breath before tackling another stretch of the scorched rock on which the soles of his feet left bloody imprints. Above his bare head, the sun hovered like a hawk in the cloudless sky. The isolated hill he was climbing was almost circular and had been eroded down to the underlying volcanic core and then quarried for building materials, so that in appearance it was almost flat, as though sheared off with a saw. When the dead man finally reached level ground, he collapsed and remained still for some time. The scene around him was one of utter desolation. The vestiges of a fortified gateway, whose blocks of stone had been too large and stubborn to remove, survived at the brink of the precipice where the crude thoroughfare had entered the former town, but looking towards the centre the only structures remaining above ground level were the ruins of houses, a small church, and opposite it an imposing fragment of walling framing an ornate doorway approached by five marble steps. All around lay heaps of rubble with weeds and small bushes growing out of them. The rounded paving stones of the main street were still clearly visible, however, and the dead man followed them, moaning with pain, until the cobbles opened out into a small piazza. He then proceeded to the church, bowing his head and crossing himself on the threshold. Ten minutes passed before he emerged. He stopped for a moment to stare up at the massive remnants of stone frontage which dominated the square, then crossed over to the set of steps leading up to the gaping doorway, knelt down and slowly crawled up the steps on his knees, one by one, until he reached the uppermost. A wild fig tree had established itself in the charred wasteland within the former dwelling, feeding on some hidden source of water far below. The dead man bent over it and kissed one of its leaves, then bowed down until his forehead touched the slightly elevated doorstep. The man watching from the ridge opposite put down his binoculars, lifted what looked like a bulky mobile phone off the dashboard of the Jeep Grand Cherokee beside him, extended the long recessed antenna and then pressed a button on the fascia. The resulting sound echoed about the walls of the valley for some time, but might easily have been mistaken for distant thunder. Excerpted from End Games by Michael Dibdin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.