A Long Finish
An Aurelio Zen Mystery
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4.4 • 14 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of Ratking and Dead Lagoon comes a delicious new Aurelio Zen mystery in which wine and truffles figure as prominently as greed and vengence.
When the son of a Piedmontese wine-making family is jailed for killing his father, Aurelio Zen is ordered to secure his release. The reason: A certain well-connected wine connoisseur wants to make sure that this year's vintage goes to harvest.
In the hill town of Alba, Zen finds himself in the midst of a traditional culture in which family and soil are inextricablt linked, bombarded with gossip, and stalked by a mysterious telephone caller with tantalizing clues to his past. He also discovers that certain meals may really be to die for. A Long Finish is Michael Dibdin at his most elegant and surprising.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Family truths and family lies, as gnarled and hidden as prized local truffles, beat at the heart of the newest case for Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen, last seen in Cosi Fan Tutti (1997). Sent in early fall from Rome to the Piedmont to determine who killed a local vintner in time to save the dead man's vintage, Zen is out of his realm in many ways. He doesn't know the language of wine or wine making, nor is he privy to the generations-old secrets that may lie behind the mutilation and murder of wealthy, unpopular Aldo Vincenzo, whose DOC Barbaresco is the best wine of the region. In jail, but only for a while, is the victim's son, Manlio, who fought loudly with his father the evening before the body was discovered. The subsequent deaths of a local truffle hunter and another vintner provide clues, but Zen's course is twisted, complicated further by his continuing distress over his girlfriend's recent abortion, by anonymous phone calls he receives at odd locations, by unexpected bouts of somnambulism and by the intimations of a local hashish-smoking, harpsichord-playing physician that the policeman harbors a deep-seated psychological problem. Even so, Zen is a masterful investigator, who steps well beyond the bounds of accepted interrogation to ferret out the decades-old relationships of love and deep resentment that surface in the current sequence of murders. The path to his ultimate success in this layered case is, as usual, pure pleasure for Dibdin's readers.
Customer Reviews
One of His Best
I've read a few other books by the author and admire his craft and style. This one has a fairly large comedic side to it that doesn't show up so much in his other mysteries. The detective Zen, is a great creation and at his best here. The bewildering connections in the small wine town setting, keep things stirred up.