Excellent thriller which paints a fascinating, though not flattering, picture of modern Italy. ( )

This novel took me quite awhile to finish. I have a feeling this was due to my recent plunging head-first into "The Brothers Karamazov" and I was carrying over from that novel the passion I devout to every paragraph, tale and nuance. In any case "Ratking" by Michael Dibdin is a solid noir detective story capturing the much of the essence and many of the flavors present in Italy circa the late 1980's. Mr. Dibdin has an excellent grasp of the various regions of Italy and is able to portray them all with lifelike quality and 3-dimensional flair while telling us a fairly good murder mystery. ( )

De Dode Lagune is beter. Ietsje.

1995 ( )

Michael Dibdin introduced Italian police detective Aurelio Zen in the Ratking and carried off the 1988 Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. An industrialist has been kidnapped in Perugia and the powers-that-be want a high-powered detective sent up from Rome to solve the crime. In mad rush of bureaucratic CYA, the police in Rome dispatch Auerlio Zen. The joke is that Zen is a has-been, blamed for the bungled end of the Aldo Moro kidnapping some four years earlier.

Dibdin develops a complex crime scenario. Is the entire kidnapping a fake, a put up job? Is the industrialist's messed up family behind the kidnapping? Why does the family not cooperate with the police? Can Zen arrange for his safe return? If not, will Zen end up back in his duties in Rome?

Zen likens the family to a 'ratking' and whether you believe that ratkings actually exist in nature, these folks are the real thing (look it up - I won't spoil the surprise).

Dibdin, however, does not stop with a mere police mystery, but develops a multi-layered story. He presents a largely dysfunctional Italian society where few people work much or very hard, certainly no more than absolutely necessary. Every individual is subject to power exercised often arbitrarily by nearly everyone else - and that's the trade-off; everyone gets at least a little power to lord over anyone wandering into their bailiwick. And Dibdin also begins to develop Zen as a complex character whose American expat girlfriend resents his sudden involvement in real police work, who lives with his mother, and who mourns the loss of a father he never really knew. In Dibdin's obit (he died in 2007), the Guardian observed that the Ratking's plot existed mainly for the presentation of "mordant dialogue and world-weary observation".

The story did drag at times; perhaps it suffered a bit from setting up Zen's back story, which took the reader away from the main story. One assumes the reader's patience will be rewarded in the remaining ten Zen novels. I look forward to reading Vendetta (Zen), the second book in the series. Highly recommended. ( )

The law seems to work in different ways in Italy. It was interesting how the conventions of say Michael Connelly's Bosch series do not quite work here. "[F]iendishly crooked novel of psychological suspense" seems to be as a blurb a bit overdone. ( )