Zen proves that you can't go home again when his return to Venice goes wrong in several different ways. He needs money to find a larger place so that he, his mother and Tania can live together. Or at least that's the plan. He has an opportunity to take on a private project, working on behalf of the family of a wealthy American who disappeared from his Venice home months age. The family wants to know if he is living or dead and what happened. In order to take on this job, Zen needs a genuine Venetian case to provide the excuse for his being there. He finds it in the complaints of an aging, dotty Contessa, an acquaintance of his mother's, who claims she is being assaulted by demons. She has a mental health history with the Venice police, but her title is enough to give Zen what he needs to move.He finds himself a stranger in his home town - the politics have changed and a separatist offshoot of the Northern League is poised to take control of the city. The police are infiltrated by the politics (of course), and each result Zen achieves is derailed by political imperatives.His old friends are caught up in it as well, and put party loyalty above friendship. The atmospherics of this book are wonderful - Venice in winter, the cold dark alleys, the coffee bars, the crumbling palazzi, the increasing poverty and disaffection of the locals as wealthy foreigners buy up most of the city. And Zen is haunted by memories of his father who disappeared on the Russian front during the late days of WWII, but is still remembered by a couple of neighbors.Dibdin's prose is elegant, his characters and dialogue wonderfully developed and his cynical but affectionate portrait of the city make this book a stand out.
Michael Dibdin’s Dead Lagoon is novel. For one thing, it takes place in Venice and immerses the reader in a culture very different from our own. Secondly, its hero, Aurelio Zen, is not your ordinary cop. He’s a member of the Criminalpol, Italy’s elite investigative unit. The country is a quagmire of corruption and political intrigue. Zen, normally based in Rome, finds an excuse to look into the case of an old family friend who claims to having been attacked by mysterious apparitions. His real reason for being in Venice is to investigate the kidnapping of a rich American. He wants to claim enough of the reward to buy a bigger apartment in Rome to billet his fiancé and mother. But it gets complicated. He solves the ghostly spinster problem but falls in love with the wife of a radical political candidate. Dibdin writes beautifully: “That infant eroticism, biddable and easily satisfied, had grown up into a moody, fractious adolescent, making demands, issuing statements, taking positions, unsure of its own identity, and contemptuous of other people’s. Whatever happened between him and Christina that afternoon, it would never have the serendipitous quality of that first encounter. From now on, whatever happened would be meant, something to be weighed and measured and taken responsibility for. He heaved a long sigh. The medical authorities were quite right: there was no such thing as safe sex."
Do You like book Dead Lagoon (1996)?
Micheal Dibdin whisks Auerlio Zen to his ancestral home of Venice in the Dead Lagoon. While he helps out an old family friend fend off masked intruders, he secretly investigates the case of a missing millionaire. However, this book is really about Venice and Zen's return home. Zen encounters ghosts from his past around every corner causing him to question his place in the world. Venice seduces both Zen and the reader. Mr. Dibdin evokes the spirit and atmosphere of Venice, while exploring the city's past, present and future. Zen is one of the great, but unheralded, literary detectives. He is a hopeless romantic and a cynic at the same time, and a joy to read. On to the next Zen novel!
—Nash Bork
Police inspector Aurelio Zen returns to his hometown of Venice to investigate a closed case as a favor for his American former girlfriend--and with the hope of a little personal financial gain for his efforts. But he has to conduct this investigation without the Venice police knowing what he is doing. To conceal this side investigation, he picks a case no one really wants or believes can be solved. But his time in Venice gets tangled with family history, old relationships and local politics. Zen does not come off as a particularly likable person at the end of this book.Dibdin employs one of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret's regular tactics near the end of the book when Zen relentlessly follows someone until they crack. Not sure I would have appreciated this had I not been recently reading the Maigret series.I was unimpressed with the handling of Zen's love interests/girlfriends. The unraveling and breakup with his girlfriend in Rome was not well motivated - especially given the buildup to their relationship. She is presented as a shrew and just pushed off the stage after Zen tumbles into bed with another in Venice.
—Nanosynergy
This is the fourth in the series featuring Italian detective Aurelio Zen. Zen comes from Venice and in this novel returns to his native city on a pretext, the real reason being to investigate in a private capacity the death of an American citizen named Durridge. He is short of money and stands to earn quite a lot if he can shed light on the case.The book is well constructed, with two main narratives intertwined. There is a great deal of description of the various districts of Venice though, sinc
—Roderick Hart
