Dead Lagoon

Zen goes back to his home town of Venice on the pretext of helping a family friend who is being scared to death by 'ghosts', In fact he is quietly investigating what appears to be a politically sensitive case about a missing man. There's a mayoral election taking place and the story was somewhat slowed by the political campaigning of a radical making it less of a page turner than others. However, it voiced the concerns Venetians have about their city and their future. And the city of Venice became a character in itself. Darker than most of Dibdin's novels but I enjoyed every minute.

This author keeps surprising me. This particular episode includes maps of Venice and it was so much fun tracing with my finger the trips up and around the canals. The last few pages were a political commentary eeriely appropriate to our current presidental contest. p.280 "You talk of Dal Maschino like a lover... He's won your heart and you don't understand why I can't see what you see in him....it's an old story...You've made an inspirational leader out of an opportunistic mob-orator and you've remade the history to fit."
Sounds like the reaction to Sarah Palin, to me.

I'm undecided about this book. I thought it was a very good thriller but, damn, I hated the main character. He was such a selfish, petty bastard whose only interest was to get back at people instead of solving anything. He trusted people based on nothing really, lied to people in order to get his way, put people in danger because his vanity was hurt and had completely uncalled for outbursts of rage. And why did he never tell the followers of the movement: if they do that, and get away with it, they are exactly as corrupt as the people they pretend to fight.

Aurelio Zen is returning to his hometown of Venice to look into the disappearance of an American millionaire. But because the disappearance case seems to have been closed for security reasons, he adopts the pretext of taking a case on behalf of a family friend. The contessa, as he knows her, is elderly and believes she is being visited by ghosts or spirits. Or are her visitors connected to more earthly crimes?

The star of this book is Venice. Through Zen’s eyes we see the city as a native and as an outsider would. This was written over 20 years ago, and then, as now, there were concerns about tourists overrunning the city and pricing out the residents, lack of job opportunities for the young, and skewed demographics. There are also show more rumblings of a breakthrough in rooting out corruption at the highest levels of government. It’s all an interesting backdrop to the cases Zen gets involved in.

I did find myself slightly ahead of Zen in the deductions department, but it was still a good read in general. show less

Zen is back home. Back in a town that he knows like the back of his hand and which must be traversed slowly--by boat of by foot. Venice--the people, the places, the history, the fear for its future--is a major character in the story, and Dibdin pulls this off pretty subtly, using a variety of mechanisms to give us a real feel for this town and its rather eccentric people. Achieving something like what Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini do for Turin in The Sunday Woman, but without the long digressions from the action of the mystery plot. And Zen, being the contrarian sort of man he is, provides a fine outsider/insider perspective on Venice.

Dead Lagoon is the fourth in the Aurelio Zen series by Michael Dibdin; this time, Zen is seconded to his home city of Venice, ostensibly to look into the apparent harassment of a somewhat demented contessa who is being plagued by ghosts, but really because he has been hired by the family of an American millionaire who went missing while living in Venice. The city of his childhood and youth is both familiar and utterly strange to him now, but his essential Venetian soul soon reorients him to his homeland, both its charms and its vices. His best friend in childhood has gotten involved in a new political party, one with a charismatic leader and a separatist agenda that aims to restore Venice to its glory as an independent city-state; this show more party seems on the verge of victory in the upcoming elections, but Zen suspects a connection to the case he is clandestinely investigating....I've been enjoying Dibdin's series, and this is no exception: the character is an engaging one, and the various people he meets are well-described and not one-note characters by any means. The plot is convoluted and intriguing, and although I solved the mystery fairly early on, I don't think these are the kind of books where the author is trying to keep the reader from guessing so I didn't mind that. I am getting a little tired of Zen's apparent problems with women: every time he gets involved with one sexually, he soon finds he cannot communicate/wants someone else/is just using her and/or being used, but of course it's never his fault that the relationship doesn't last, it's always hers. In that respect, one would wish that Zen would grow up already, but that might be too much to ask of a modern Italian man. Still recommended though! show less

An Aurelio Zen book. I've already read the first of this series. This was the fourth.
Zen returns to his home city to investigate the disappearance of a rich American whose case was closed by the authorities. He has been hired by the family and his activities must be kept secret, so he arranges to be sent to look into complaints by an old friend of his family who claims to be subjected to home visitations by possibly imaginary harassers. At the very start of the book, an man sneeks to an island at night to retrieve some contraband but stumbles upon a clothed skeleton hanging from a tree. There is alos a political campaign going on that seeks to have Venice achieve its independence from Italy.
This is a very well constructed book, show more developing its three main plot lines cleverly and interestingly. The relations between Zen and the local police force and with people he knows from his childhood. show less