http://avadhutrecommends.wordpress.com/Inspector Montalbano piqued my interest in Italian crime series. I started looking for good Italian mysteries and the name that kept cropping up at every corner was Aurelio Zen by Michael Dibdin. So, I jumped into middle of the series with Blood Rain. Right from beginning, I took a liking to the book. Dibdin writes in that half cynical, half-mocking style that is my favourite. Zen is cast from the same mould as my other favourite detectives, cynical with a wry sense of humour, one who knows the futility of his job but has a built in compass that always points towards justice, even though he is well aware how frustrating it can be to obtain justice for his victims in a corrupt society.The book starts with murder of local mafia don’s son. Zen’s new posting is in Catania, Sicily. His job is to liaise between different police departments (a polite way of saying that his real job is to spy on anti mafia squad on behalf of his masters in Rome). He is also getting to know his adopted daughter Carla. Carla ends up on mafia’s radar as she is installing computer network in anti mafia squad’s office and befriends Judge Corinna Nunziatelli, who is investigating the murder. Soon, this treacherous game of deception and lies engulfs Zen. Being a northerner, he is out of his depth in Sicily, where warring mafia factions and their various supporters in government make it a tough job to identify who is really on which side.Reading this book in the middle of the Great Indian charade that is called General Elections where almost one third of parliamentary candidates fielded by major Indian political parties face criminal cases (murder, extortion, kidnapping… you name it !) gave me a sense of Déjà vu. It was as if Didbin was talking about northern badlands of India when he described Sicily’s mafia culture. The distinction between police, mafia and politicians is permanently blurred (just like in India). Interests of many sides crisscross each other in such a complicated manner, it is impossible to remain on sidelines. Zen is caught in the crossfire, becomes fugitive and it takes all his wit and courage and some luck to survive. Just when we think Zen has finally managed to come out of the mess, there is another attempt on his life. Didbin ends the book leaving Zen’s fate unanswered, thus highlighting how anybody can end up being a pawn in someone else’s power game.Blood Rain has added one more series on my TBR pile and I am definitely going to read the series from beginning now.
Blood Rain is a novel in Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen mystery series, this time taking place in Sicily. Zen is sent there essentially to spy on the activities of an anti-Mafia squad, an elite corps that may be working without proper authorization in certain circumstances. Once there, he finds himself caught between several different groups of law enforcement officers and those on the other side of the law. His adopted daughter Carla is also in Sicily, assigned to install a new, integrated computer system for the anti-Mafia squad, and she attracts the attention of one of the judges working in the same department, a woman who is always under intense police protection because of the Mafia's propensity for knocking off judges. When Carla discovers that someone is infiltrating the new computer system even as she is installing it, she is not sure how to handle it or who to turn to for advice, but advice is something that she - and Zen - desperately needs.... I had previously read the first four Zen novels, but could not find the next two or three (even on Amazon!), so Carla is completely new to me and I found that not having read the entire series made a difference in how I viewed her and what happens to her. Aside from that problem, though, Blood Rain was an exciting and tense read, one that had me so worried at the end of it that I had to immediately search out the next book in the series in order to find out what happens next. Recommended - but definitely try to read the earlier books first!
Do You like book Blood Rain (2004)?
This is the seventh in the series of novels featuring Aurelio Zen, a detective from Venice. Each novel finds Zen in a different part of Italy, in this case Sicily. As might be expected, the Mafia features here. But the Mafia, as described in the book, is not so much a single organisation as a group of competing families or clans who communicate with each other by messages. Sometimes these messages seem to be clear – for example, cutting a leg off the competition with a chainsaw and delivering it direct to their doorstep. There are two problems with this. The first is being sure you know who is actually sending the message: is it who you would expect, or someone else trying to dupe you into thinking it is who you would expect? The second problem is working out what the message really means - which is hard enough anyway, but twice as hard if you aren’t sure who sent it. This novel is unusually full of messages and because Zen isn’t a native of Sicily he is, by his usual standards, unusually inept in detecting and interpreting them. This places him in great danger from which he is rescued by others or by accident. On one occasion he is rescued by football fans and on another by an earthquake which begins at exactly the right time to deter his attackers. (How likely is that?) The book ends with an explosion (another message) and, but for the fact that there are four more books in the series, it isn’t at all clear that Zen survives it.The book has Dibden’s usual virtues. It is beautifully written, with some excellent descriptions of scene and character. The plot is complex but perhaps overly subtle: there is so much that Zen doesn’t fully understand that the same goes for the reader. The mood is also unusually sombre given two deaths half way through which affect him personally.
—Roderick Hart
* * 1/2In this installment of the Aurelio Zen series, Zen is sent to Sicily on assignment as a "liaison officer" (read as "spy") with the anti-Mafia squad. His job is to report back to Rome on the squad's morale and any signs of discontent. In the meantime, he is also getting to know his adopted daughter, Carla, who works as a computer technician for a company that is bringing the anti-Mafia squad online (or as Dibdin charmingly writes, "on-line") with its own little intranet. Somehow Carla ends
—rabbitprincess
Dibdin continues Zen's peregrinations across Italy with a posting in Sicily in this novel. I definitely liked the noticeably darker tone and look forward to reading further in the series. That said, we have seen and read so much about the Mafia over the last 40 years that it's hard to feel that the villains in Blood Rain aren't rather thin. And while in some ways Zen solves the mystery, the book also ends with a cliffhanger. I will be interested to see if the next book in the series continues this story and/or fleshes out the longer arc of the novels (which seems to me to have become increasingly just a plot device as I read on).
—Mitch
