EricCWelch

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."