num_pages: 297
description: Among the emerging generation of crime writers, none is as stylish and intelligent as Michael Dibdin, who, in Dead Lagoon, gives us a deliciously creepy new novel featuring the urbane and skeptical Aurelio Zen, a detective whose unenviable task it is to combat crime in a country where today's superiors may be tomorrow's defendants. Zen returns to his native Venice. He is searching for the ghostly tormentors of a half-demented contessa and a vanished American millionaire whose family is paying Zen under the table to determine his whereabouts--dead or alive. But he keeps stumbling over corpses that are distressingly concrete: from the crooked cop found drowned in one of the city's noisome "black wells" to a brand-new skeleton that surfaces on the Isle of the Dead. The result is a mystery rich in character and deduction, and intensely informed about the history, politics, and manners of its Venetian setting.
language: English
title: Dead Lagoon
titlecomplete: Dead Lagoon (Aurelio Zen, #4)
characters: Aurelio Zen
genres: Fiction, Action, Italy, Mystery, Thriller, Zen, Detective, Mystery Thriller, Italian Literature, Crime
ratings_count: 2174
places: Venice
series: Aurelio Zen
publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard