Cosi Fan Tutti: An Aurelio Zen Mystery
The career of Italian policeman Auerlio Zen has certainly had its operatic ups and downs: as a nasty colleague points out, "In Milan, you wrongfully arrest a man for the Tondelli murder, and 20 years later he tries to kill you after his release from prison. In Rome, you single-handedly 'solve' the Moro kidnapping, unfortunately too late to save the victim." So it's fitting that Michael Dibdin has used a real comic opera by Mozart and Lorenzo Daponte as the frame for his latest Zen outing. A Northern fish in Naples's polluted waters, Venetian-born Zen seems to have found the perfect job to make himself invisible, as head of the harbor police. But several tangled plots--including one that deftly turns the Daponte stew of unsuitable suitors and fake Albanians on its head--conspire to bring Auerlio into the spotlight one more time. Two of Dibdin's best Zen encounters,RatkingandDead Lagoon, are available in paperback.