Cosi Fan Tutti

An Aurelio Zen Novel

Michael Dibdin's overburdened Italian police inspector has been transferred to Naples, where the rule of law is so lax that a police station may double as a brothel. But this time, having alienated superiors with his impolitic zealousness in every previous posting, Zen is determined not to make waves.

Too bad an American sailor (who may be neither American nor a sailor) knifes one of his opposite numbers in Naples's harbor, and some local garbage collectors have taken to moonlighting in homicide. And when Zen becomes embroiled in a romantic intrigue involving love-sick gangsters and prostitutes who pass themselves off as Albanian refugees, all Naples comes to resemble the set of the Mozart opera of the same title. Bawdy, suspenseful, and splendidly farcical, the result is an irresistible offering from a maestro of mystery.

Amazon.com ReviewThe 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, Ratking and Dead Lagoon, are available in paperback.

From Library JournalAssigned to Naples, policeman Aurelio Zen takes time to assist a local wealthy widow: he refuses to let her daughters marry their supposedly Mafia-connected fiances. Soon involved in a case of murder and mistaken for Mafia himself, Zen plays out Dibdin's (Dark Spector, LJ 12/95) version of a darkly comic opera.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.