Aurelio Zen: Back to Bologna

By: Michael Dibdin

Narrated by: Cameron Stewart

When the corpse of the shady industrialist who owns the local football team is found both shot and stabbed with a Parmesan knife, Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen is called to Bologna to oversee the investigation.

Recovering slowly from surgery and fleeing an equally painful crisis in his personal life, Zen is only too happy to take on what at first appears to be a routine and relatively undemanding assignment. But soon a world-famous university professor is shot with the same gun, immediately after publicly humiliating Italy's leading celebrity television chef, and the case - intertwined with the fates of an earnest student of semiotics and a mysterious young immigrant who claims to be from Ruritania - spins out of control, and Zen is in no condition to rise to the challenge.

There's also a wild card in the pack: Tony Speranza, Bologna's most flamboyant private detective. Back to Bologna is dazzlingly plotted, features a cast of vivid and idiosyncratic characters and along the way delivers both comic and serious insights into the realities of today's Italy.

Michael Dibdin was born in 1947. He went to school in Northern Ireland and later to Sussex University and the University of Alberta in Canada. He lived in Seattle.

After completing his first novel, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, in 1978, he spent four years in Italy teaching English at the University of Perugia. His second novel, A Rich Full Death, was published in 1986. It was followed by Ratking in 1988, which won the Gold Dagger Award for the Best Crime Novel of the year and introduced us to his Italian detective Inspector Aurelio Zen.

In 1989 The Tryst was published to great acclaim and was followed by Vendetta in 1990, the second story in the Zen series. His last novel, End Games, was published posthumously in July 2007.

©2005 Michael Dibdin (P)2014 Audible, Ltd

Narrator Spoils a Good Book

The narrator manages male characters’ voices well enough, but the falsetto voice used for female characters sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard, and brings Monty Python to mind. The effect is demeaning and diminishing as it makes all of the female characters into shrill caricatures of women. None of the female characters come across as intelligent or strong, except, oddly enough, Flavia.

Great fun.

Loved the language. And the irony. The characters, and of course always Italy. None of my friends have tuned in though. They're all philistines who cherish the gossipy-toned pablum.

Annoying narration

Good book, but the narration of women's voices by this narrator is annoying and cartoonish..

Clever twists and turns

Those who have read the Aurelio Zen books love Gibson's cultural commentary through his scenes of all systems Italian. This work takes the twists and turns in fun new directions: punks criming, cooks cooking, private investigators dreaming, and police waiting for things to call in their laps, solved. What fun it turns out to be! Kudos on the ending scenes.