There can be no question that the contents of this book will prove extremely controversial. Many people will be deeply shocked by the nature of Watson's statement. Many will no doubt prefer to reject it rather than surrender the beliefs of a lifetime. Others will at least regret that two of the great mysteries of crime are finally solved... An extraordinary document comes to light which for fifty years had been held on deposit by the bankers of the deceased John Herbert Watson MD - better ...

WINNER OF THE CWA GOLD DAGGER'Tremendously exciting.' RUTH RENDELL'Energetic and genre-stretching.' GUARDIANAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYPolice Commissioner Aurelio Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. But from the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia to take over an explosive kidnapping case involving one of Italy's most...

When an advance scout for an American film company disappears, Aurelio Zen's most recent assignment in remote Calabria becomes anything but routine. Despite a savage attack that has scared the locals silent, Zen is determined to expose the truth. To make matters more complicated, a group of dangerous strangers, led by a rich, single-minded American have arrived to uncover another local mystery—buried treasure—and they will stop at nothing to achieve their goal. What ensues is a fiendishly ...

After a decomposed body is discovered in an abandoned military tunnel, Inspector Aurelio Zen travels north to the Italian Alps to investigate. At first glance, the death appears to have been an accident. But when Zen takes a closer look, a mysterious tattoo begins to tell a much more sinister tale, especially after the body is snatched from the morgue. As Zen races to discover the inner workings of a clandestine military organization named Medusa, he is reminded of just how lethal Italian ...

In the latest installment in his critically acclaimed Italian mystery series, Michael Didbin sends Aurelio Zen to Italy’s culinary capital, Bologna, where he discovers that some cases are not quite what they appear to be.When the corpse of the shady Bologna industrialist who owns the local football team is found both shot and stabbed with a Parmesan knife, Aurelio Zen is summoned to oversee the investigation. Anxious for a break from his girlfriend, who attributes Zen’s slow recove...

Winner of the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award, this chilling police procedural is a masterpiece of psychological suspense.Italian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen is dispatched to investigate the kidnapping of Ruggiero Miletti, a powerful Perugian industrialist. But nobody much wants Zen to succeed: not the local authorities, who view him as an interloper, and certainly not Miletti's children, who seem content to let the head of the family languish in th...

WINNDER OF THE CWA GOLD DAGGER'Wonderfully intricate.' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS'Heart-pounding . . . a terrifying tale of revenge.' MYSTERY NEWSAN AURELIO ZEN MYSTERYInspector Aurelio Zen has a problem: the impossible murder of an eccentric billionaire, recorded on the closed-circuit video of Oscar Burolo's top-security Sardinian fortress. Officials in a high government minist...

“One of my patients thinks somebody’s trying to kill him,” Aileen Macklin says to her husband over breakfast. A psychiatrist with a fading marriage, Aileen is haunted by the glue-sniffing lad who comes to her in a panic, begging to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital for protection. Gary Dunn clearly needs help: ravaged by his squalid existence, he is paralyzed with fear about a murder he has witnessed and convinced he may be next. Unfortunately for Gary, he may just be right. And unfort...

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 tantaliz...

Karen and I on the sofa, Karen and I in the back seat of the BMW, Karen and I at the river, up the alley, down the garden, round the corner, in the pub. Our movements are furtive, frantic and compulsive. Our pleasures are brief and incomplete. Our frustrations are enormous. Because if you look closely at the background of every scene, you'll see Dennis.Dennis and Karen lead a pleasant life in North Oxford until the day one of their dinner guests seduces Karen in the kitche...

Having survived an explosive assassination attempt, Italian police detective Aurelio Zen finds himself convalescing at a Tuscan seaside resort town, where he is under orders to lie low until he is to testify at a much-anticipated Mafia trial. The quiet—and the boredom are relieved by the pleasant distraction of the beautiful Gemma, but just when he feels he is getting somewhere with her, a the discovery of corpse in his usual lounge chair brings his holiday to an abrupt end. Convinced that...

An Aurelio Zen NovelMichael 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...