Medusa

Assigned to investigate the discovery of a body found in a network of
abandoned military tunnels in the Italian Alps, Zen finds himself
inhabiting a strange relic of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a region more
German than Italian. Although the 30-year-old body yields few clues and
promises little, any temptation Zen might have to dismiss the case as a
routine accident is broken when he learns that the body has been whisked
away from the local hospital in the dead of night by a crack team of
carabinieri.

Meanwhile an antiquarian bookseller is so panicked by what he reads about
the case in the newspaper that he immediately leaves Milan for the
anonymous countryside of his youth, and a former army colleague meets his
maker in a brand new mini-cooper packed with explosive.

As with all the books in the series, Dibdin brilliantly portrays Italian
politics as a hall of mirrors, where cock-up and conspiracy lurk
hand-in-hand in the shadows. Berlusconi's 'new' Italy is no different from
any other period in the country's complex political history since the
Second World War, but whether this case is destined to blow the lid off a
neo-fascist right-wing plot or simply to expose a tawdry tale of  love, sex
and jealousy, Zen can only wait and see and wonder.