End Games
From AwardAnnals
 | |
| Author(s) | Michael Dibdin |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | An Aurelio Zen Mystery |
| Publisher | Pantheon Books |
| Honors | |
| In Calabria, Italy, an American lawyer is missing, presumed kidnapped. A movie company is about to start filming the story of the Book of Revelation. An obsessed games player, richer than Croesus, is determined to find an ancient Roman statue that is buried under a river. A team of mercenaries is on its way there from Iraq to assist. And Aurelio Zen’s latest posting is Cosenza, Calabria, where the local chief of police has shot himself in the foot. Looking down on all this activity is the abandoned village of Altomonte, once the seat of the powerful Calopezzati family. When the lawyer’s bloody corpse is discovered in Altomonte, Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the local code of silence and uncover the truth. But his quest is quickly complicated by the lavish and clandestine treasure hunt, which Zen learns is being carried out by no ordinary fanatics. | |
The final installment in this award-winning series brings Italian police detective Aurelio Zen to remote Calabria, where the Venice-born-and-bred detective feels uncomfortably like a foreigner.
It’s a routine assignment, and Aurelio Zen is biding his time in Calabria while the locals go about their mysterious business. Routine, that is, until an advance scout for an American film company suddenly vanishes. Beneath the surface of a tight-knit traditional community—with secrets and loyalties that go back centuries—violent forces are at work. Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth behind a brutal murder. However, his mission is complicated by another secret that has drawn strangers from the other side of the world on a hunt for buried treasure–a search that has been launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing a bizarre and deadly obsession.
It’s a devilishly suspenseful and entertaining adventure that only Aurelio Zen could stumble into—and only Michael Dibdin could serve up. In End Games, the award-winning author has crafted a suspenseful, action-packed thriller full of unexpected twists and turns—a story that takes us deep into a proud and ancient culture and into the darkest corners of the human heart.
Reviews
Amazon.com
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. This is it—the final Aurelio Zen novel, now that death has claimed the Italian copper’s talented creator, Michael Dibdin. End Games is a fitting finale to a remarkable series of books, in which Dibdin developed the character of his difficult but tenacious Italian policeman and, inter alia, gave readers a vivid and atmospheric picture of the whole of Italy in all its splendour, colour and corruption.
This last book transports Zen to far-flung Calabria for what she appears to be a by-the-numbers assignment. But in this close-mouthed, inhospitable place, Zen discovers that there is a worm at the heart of a community and secrets that reach back over centuries. A savage killing has taken place, and investigations are compromised by the presence of people from other countries in search of a buried treasure.
In the past, Dibdin ensured that Zen repeatedly came up against a wall of silence, but none more implacable than that he encounters here. As the detective slowly but surely peels away the layers of mystery and obfuscation, he is forced to confront the very basis of the concepts by which he has tried to maintain his career: honesty, a sense of justice and firm notions of right and wrong. As always with this writer, the sense of locale is conjured up with maximum vividness, and the final effect of reading the book that writes finis to the careers of both Aurelio Zen and the man who created him is twofold: we are grateful that this final entry is a distinguished one, but saddened that we will never again go down those mean Italian streets that Zen led us down—at least not with Michael Dibdin as our guide…—Barry Forshaw
