Blood Rain - 7
Page 24
The motorcycle rider replaced his helmet and turned his machine around. It had been an impressive blast, even though they’d had very little time. The quantity of explosives used was only a fraction of the amount which the Mafia had used to kill the judges Paolo Falcone and Giovanni Borsellino. But this too would be perceived as a message. After all, Zen was just a policeman.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like so much of Italian public and political life, this is a work of fiction. It is however based to some extent on fact, and could not have been written without the help of many friends and contacts in Sicily and elsewhere, some of whom asked not to be named. I would particularly like to thank Dottore Domenico Percolla of the Questura di Catania, Karen Bass, Livia Borghese, Michael Burgoyne, Kirk Peterson, Jonathan Raban, Guido Ruotolo, Alexander Stille, and above all my wife Kathrine.
Catania — Seattle — Rome
February 1999
ALSO BY MICHAEL DIBDIN
CABAL
An apparent suicide in the Vatican may have been a murder conducted by a centuries-old cabal. A discovery among the medieval manuscripts of the Vatican Library leads to a second death. And Zen’s lover, the tantalizing Tania, is conducting her own covert operations—which could well jeopardize everything Zen has worked for.
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COSI FAN TUTTI
An American sailor (who may be neither American nor a sailor) knifes someone in Naples’s harbor, and some local garbage collectors have begun moonlighting in homicide. Add a romantic intrigue involving love-sick gangsters and prostitutes disguised as Albanian refugees and you have one of Zen’s greatest challenges yet.
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DARK SPECTER
The murders take place in distant cities and with no apparent motives. But a dogged Seattle detective and a horribly bereaved survivor are about to come face-to-face with their perpetrator—a man named Los, a self-styled prophet who has the power to make his followers travel thousands of miles to kill for him.
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DEAD LAGOON
Michael Dibdin’s urbane and skeptical detective Zen returns to his native Venice to search for a vanished American millionaire. The result is a mystery rich in character and intensely informed about the history, politics, and manners of its Venetian setting.
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THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
The setting is Eventide Lodge, where guests have gathered for tea. Colonel Weatherby is reading by the fire. Mrs. Hiram Hargreave III is whiling away her time at patience. And Miss Rosemary Travis and her friend, Dorothy, are wondering which of their housemates will be the next to die.
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THE LAST SHERLOCK HOLMES STORY
Michael Dibdin pits the sleuth of Baker Street against the Butcher of Whitechapel—the archfiend Jack the Ripper. And in doing so, he gives us a Holmes possessed of greater and more disturbing depths than the one we thought we knew.
Crime Fiction/0-679-76658-8
A LONG FINISH
When the son of a Piedmontese wine-making family is jailed for patricide, Zen is ordered to secure his release, because a well-connected wine connoisseur wants to ensure this year’s wine harvest. Zen finds himself in the midst of a traditional culture in which family and soil are inextricably linked and certain meals may really be to die for.
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RATKING
In this chilling masterpiece of police procedure and psychological suspense, the stoic Italian police commissioner Aurelio Zen goes to investigate the kidnapping of Ruggiero Miletti, a powerful Perugian industrialist.
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A RICH FULL DEATH
Florence, 1855. “The English are dying too much,” the police chief observes. The distinguished resident Robert Browning launches his own private investigation, aided by an expatriate Robert Booth, but their amateur sleuthing is hampered by the fact that each of their suspects becomes the next victim.
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VENDETTA
An eccentric billionaire, whose corrupt dealings enriched some of the most exalted figures in Italian politics, has been killed on his heavily fortified estate. The cameras have captured his grisly death, but not the face of his killer. And that same killer—elusive, implacable, and deranged—may now be stalking Zen.
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VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, MAY 2001
Copyright © 1999 by Michael Dibdin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Dibdin, Michael.
Blood rain: an Aurelio Zen mystery/Michael Dibdin.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-55474-1
I. Title.
PR6054.126 B58 2000 823′.914—dc21 99–046938
Author photograph by Isolde Ohlbaum
www.vintagebooks.com
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