Cabal (Aurelio Zen Series #3)

by Michael Dibdin

Overview

In Cabal, master crime writer Michael Dibdin plunges us into a murky world of church spies, secret societies, cover-ups, and mistaken identities.

An apparent suicide in the Vatican may in fact have been a muder conducted by a centuries-old cabal within The Knights of Columbus. A discovery among the medieval manuscripts of the Vatican Library leads to a second death, Zen travels to Milan, where he faces a final, dramatic showdown. Meanwhile, Zen's lover, the tantalizing Tania, is conducting her own covert operations--which could well jeopardize everything Zen has worked for. Richly textured, wickedly entertaining, Cabal taps the mysterious beauty of Italy in a thriller that challenges our beliefs about love, allegiance, history, and power--and the lengths to which we will go to protect them against the truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307822475
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/06/2012
Series:	Aurelio Zen Series , #3
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Michael Dibdin was born in England and raised in Northern Ireland. He attended Sussex University and the University of Alberta in Canada. He spent five years in Perugia, Italy, where he taught English at the local university. He went on to live in Oxford, England and Seattle, Washington. He was the author of eighteen novels, eleven of them in the popular Aurelio Zen series, including Ratking, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and Cabal, which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He died in 2007.

Editorial Reviews

Whether he's writing the delightfully iconoclastic Aurelio Zen mysteries, of which this is the second, or exposing in neo-Dickensian manner the substrata of contemporary British society ("The Tryst" [1989] and "Dirty Tricks" [1988]), Michael Dibdin never fails to impress. The Zen tales offer him less opportunity to stretch than his nondetective novels, but he still finds plenty to do within the confines of formula. Bringing new meaning to the concept of world-weariness, Rome police inspector Zen is perfectly willing to accommodate the various levels of corruption that permeate the Eternal City, which is why--when he's called in by the Vatican to put his imprimatur on a suicide verdict (jumpers from St. Peter's Basilica aren't that uncommon)--he readily suppresses evidence suggesting murder. Unfortunately, the evidence won't stay suppressed, and soon Zen is dancing between giving his corrupt masters what they want and actually solving the case, which may involve a mysterious organization called the Cabal. Whodunit fans will find plenty to enjoy in the twisting, turning plot, but the real fun here is getting to know Zen, whose many wiles never seem quite enough to cope with the conflicting demands placed upon him by a decadent world, an overprotective mother, and a loving but complex mistress.

Bill Ott

"Beautifully written. . . .  An excellent thriller." —The Wall Street Journal

"Dibdin has a gift for shocking the unshockable reader." —Ruth Rendell

"The kind of wry, sly morality tale only a writer at the top of his game could bring off successfully." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

From the Publisher