End Games: The Last Aurelio Zen Mystery [Paperback]

As the novel opens, Aurelio Zen has been appointed the acting police chief in a small Calabrian city. Zen's uneventful tenure is disturbed by the kidnapping and brutal murder of an American lawyer doing location scouting for a film company. To solve this crime, Zen must enter the closed world of the Calabrian countryside.

In the Anglo/American tradition of the crime novel, there may be some corruption in the world but in the end the system works. Criminals are caught and justice is done. Things are more complicated in the Latin crime novel. The system works in its own way but there are a whole series hidden rules that only the insiders know. Its a cynical and very old world approach to justice. The attraction of these stories is that they are so different from the rational and modern Anglo/American tradition.

Writing in this crime writing tradition, Michael Dibdin set each of the Aurelio Zen novels in a different part of Italy. In turn, each of the regions become supporting characters in his novels. Calabria is located in the toe of Italy and it is a region known for its poverty, its history of exploitation by feudal landowners and the toughness of its peasants. "End Games" is Dibdin's meditation on the world of rural banditry and the closed peasant communities in which this old tradition still survives.

Sadly, Michael Dibdin passed away in March 2007. "End Games" is the last book in the Aurelio Zen series. Mystery readers will greatly miss Dibdin and his complicated hero Aurelio Zen. For fans of this memorable series, it is good to know that Dibdin ended the series in fine fashion. For fans of the Latin crime novel, I would recommend reading Paco Ignacio Taibo, Leonardo Sciascia and Rubem Fonseca. All great writers and social commentators.

"End Games" is Michael Dibdin's last book and he and his much loved Italian detective, Aurelio Zen, will be terribly missed by thousands of fans. Happily, this last adventure of the sardonic and world-weary Venetian detective is one of his best ever.

While "End Games" shares some of the classic story elements of early Zen books--his quasi exiling to a provincial city of Italy for some offense to the powers that be; his cynicism about Italian politics and the Italian character; and his middle-aged angst--there is clever and farcical humor in this story that I don't remember seeing in the series since "Cosi Fan Tutti."

Zen shares this book with a number of broadly drawn American characters who, at times, seem borrowed from Carl Hiaasen's dark romps in Florida. That resemblance in no way detracts from the storyline and merges well with Zen's attempts to tip-toe through a temporary stay in unfamiliar and xenophobic Calabria.

No need to explain the plot of the book, but suffice it to say that it is highly original and constantly zig-zagging until the end. "End Games" is an entirely satisfying finale to a wonderful series and a fine testimony to the writing career of Michal Dibdin, who passed away this year.

With the death of British author Michael Dibdin this past April at age 60, the peripatetic career of Italian police investigator Aurelio Zen comes to an end after 11 books.

Zen, always an outsider, always a bit homesick for his native Venice, conducts each investigation in a different region. Although based in Rome, Zen's penchant for rocking the status quo and pursuing leads into inconvenient places finds him frequently exiled, often to places even less to his liking.

From his first appearance in Perugia ("Ratking"), where Dibdin taught English for four years, to Sardinia, Naples, Rome, Bologna, Venice, Sicily, Piedmont, Tuscany, the Dolomites, and Calabria, Zen casts a critical eye on the local people, customs and sociopolitical systems, finding most of it wanting.

But he generally feels the same way about his colleagues, with a few exceptions, and has little respect for the cozy relationships between powers that be. Ironic and detached, he's apolitical and not above bending, even breaking, the law when it suits him. He negotiates the corruption and gamesmanship of the police bureaucracy with skill, but he's just contrary and independent enough to keep himself from advancing in his career. Improvisation is one of his strongest investigative techniques and while he never beats the system (not even Superman can do that), he outwits its members regularly.

Both dark and comic, the Zen series offers regional immersion, complex plots, flesh-and-blood characters and some of the best writing in detective fiction. Zen himself is not the same from book to book. While always partial to the finer comforts of life, he can be crotchety, depressed, even petty and neurotic.

In "End Games," he has been sent to remote Calabria to cool his heels as the temporary provincial police chief until the permanent man - who has shot himself in the foot with his never-used firearm - recovers.

The harsh heat, the unforgiving sun, the brief, spectacular thunder showers, the penchant for touching one another during conversation; all these peculiarities pale beside the inedible food. His chief complaint is the ubiquitous tomato.

"Not for the first time, he asked himself how this bland, yet cloying fruit had come to stand as the symbol of Italian cuisine worldwide, despite the fact that until a century or so ago very few Italians had even seen a tomato...." Mentally ranting, Zen finally runs down. "Obsession was an occupational hazard in Calabria, but obsessing about tomatoes was absurd."

Outside, chatting with the proprietor, he learns that Peter Newman - the American victim in his kidnapping case and a lawyer for an American movie company - was actually a native Calabrian who had immigrated to the U.S. And not just any Calabrian but the descendant of the area's largest, most notorious landowning family, the Calopezzatis, a family who had owned half of Calabria until the land reform acts of the 1950s.

Curioser and curioser, the man's U.S. immigration papers are marked "sensitive," and not for distribution to foreigners. Zen gets the information he needs easily enough, but it only poses more questions.

Meanwhile, the reader has already seen a man climb a hill to his doom and met the wealthy American gamer, Jake Daniels, and his chief enforcer and factotum, Martin Nguyen, whose father had been a torturer for the Diem regime. Daniels is the man behind the movie project - a filming of "Revelations" with a famous old Italian director. The movie is simply an elaborate cover for a treasure hunt. When they find the treasure they intend to have six Iraqis dig it up then get rid of them with a car bomb back home to keep things quiet.

" `You mean like permadeath?' said Jake. `Man, that's heavy.' "

When a French tourist discovers Peter Newman on top of that hill with his head blown off, Zen needs to delve into some not-so-ancient history. But the Calabrian tradition of silence is even more serious than he knows.

As always, Dibdin's plot becomes more complex as more people stick their fingers in, stirring things and thinking they are clever. Some of them are, some not, but their moves - desperate, sneaky, remorseful, murderous or vengeful - and Zen's countermoves, create a twisting, many-layered plot with reverberating consequences.

You never know who's going to die in a Dibdin novel, despite the comic aspects, so there is a tension that goes beyond the casual brutality and zany aspects of the story. Though it's sad to have such a masterful series end, Dibdin has struck the right balance between humor, darkness and cultural insight.

New readers and old fans alike may be tempted to start again from the beginning. Dibdin and Aurelio Zen will be missed.

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