Review

Medusa

By Michael Dibdin

Published by Faber

Assigned to investigate the discovery of a body found in a network of abandoned military tunnels in the Italian Alps, Inspector Aurelio 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 Zen 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.

Reviewed by Huw Molseed

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