Dead Lagoon: An Aurelio Zen Mystery

by Michael Dibdin

Paperback, 1994

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Publication

Vintage

Description

Among the emerging generation of crime writers, none is as stylish and intelligent as Michael Dibdin, who, inDead 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-dementedcontessaand 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. From the Trade Paperback edition.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member CommonReeda

Like all the Zen books this has a terrific sense of place, an interesting hero and a richer text than most of the genre.

12 more

LibraryThing member mykl-s

Dead Lagoon: An Aurelio Zen Mystery by Michael Dibdin (1996)

LibraryThing member verenka

I'm undecided about this book. I thought it was a very good thriller but, damn, I hated the main character. He was such a selfish, petty bastard whose only interest was to get back at people instead of solving anything. He trusted people based on nothing really, lied to people in order to get his

way, put people in danger because his vanity was hurt and had completely uncalled for outbursts of rage. And why did he never tell the followers of the movement: if they do that, and get away with it, they are exactly as corrupt as the people they pretend to fight.

Show Less

LibraryThing member kerns222

Dont wanna go to venice after this. Sounds muddy and smelly. And corrupt but that was expected.

LibraryThing member reader68

Originally published in 1994. Aurelio Zen returns to his native Venice to investigate the disappearance of an American resident and also helps an older aristocratic lady deal with the disappearance of her daughter during World War II. Zen also discovers his father is still alive and living in

Poland; he was thought to have been killed in Russia during the war. Zen is relieved to return to Rome.Not one of the best in the Zen series.

Show Less

LibraryThing member nmele

This was the first of the Aurelio Zen books I ever read and I did not particularly enjoy it, but after reading all the others, I returned to it and found myself once again admiring Dibdin's work. This is a darker book than many of the earlier ones in the series, but most of the later Zen novels

seem to me to be darker than the earlier ones.

Show Less

LibraryThing member ecw0647

Michael Dibdin’s Dead Lagoon is novel. For one thing, it takes place in Venice and immerses the reader in a culture very different from our own. Secondly, its hero, Aurelio Zen, is not your ordinary cop. He’s a member of the Criminalpol, Italy’s elite investigative unit. The country is a

quagmire of corruption and political intrigue. Zen, normally based in Rome, finds an excuse to look into the case of an old family friend who claims to having been attacked by mysterious apparitions. His real reason for being in Venice is to investigate the kidnapping of a rich American. He wants to claim enough of the reward to buy a bigger apartment in Rome to billet his fiancé and mother. But it gets complicated. He solves the ghostly spinster problem but falls in love with the wife of a radical political candidate. Dibdin writes beautifully: “That infant eroticism, biddable and easily satisfied, had grown up into a moody, fractious adolescent, making demands, issuing statements, taking positions, unsure of its own identity, and contemptuous of other people’s. Whatever happened between him and Christina that afternoon, it would never have the serendipitous quality of that first encounter. From now on, whatever happened would be meant, something to be weighed and measured and taken responsibility for. He heaved a long sigh. The medical authorities were quite right: there was no such thing as safe sex."

Show Less

LibraryThing member DramMan

Crime thriller set in Venice. Atmospheric description of Venetian life, weather and topography. Aurelio Zen character came across as gritter than portrayed in TV series. Would I read another of the author's works, probably not.

LibraryThing member ehines

Zen is back home. Back in a town that he knows like the back of his hand and which must be traversed slowly--by boat of by foot. Venice--the people, the places, the history, the fear for its future--is a major character in the story, and Dibdin pulls this off pretty subtly, using a variety of

mechanisms to give us a real feel for this town and its rather eccentric people. Achieving something like what Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini do for Turin in The Sunday Woman, but without the long digressions from the action of the mystery plot. And Zen, being the contrarian sort of man he is, provides a fine outsider/insider perspective on Venice.

Show Less

LibraryThing member VictoriaJZ

Just finished rereading Disdain's Dead Lagoon. Glad I took the time to do so, as having stayed in Venice for a month last year, I could almost identify the places he describes. Atmospheric, Zen is not particularly likable, but the story certainly was mysterious and there were enough false leads and

dead ends to suit me.

Show Less

LibraryThing member BillPilgrim

An Aurelio Zen book. I've already read the first of this series. This was the fourth.
Zen returns to his home city to investigate the disappearance of a rich American whose case was closed by the authorities. He has been hired by the family and his activities must be kept secret, so he arranges to

be sent to look into complaints by an old friend of his family who claims to be subjected to home visitations by possibly imaginary harassers. At the very start of the book, an man sneeks to an island at night to retrieve some contraband but stumbles upon a clothed skeleton hanging from a tree. There is alos a political campaign going on that seeks to have Venice achieve its independence from Italy.
This is a very well constructed book, developing its three main plot lines cleverly and interestingly. The relations between Zen and the local police force and with people he knows from his childhood.

Show Less

LibraryThing member jkdavies

Interesting and atmospheric, this read gains an extra star for the evocative portrayal of Venice and the lagoons. Set against the backdrop of an election, and an investigation into ghostly goings on, Aurelio Zen comes across as a mostly well meaning but sometimes vindictive and insensitive bloke

and detective. He seems more thoughtful in later books.

Show Less

LibraryThing member mitchanderson

A shining example of modern noir

Fewer