Blood Rain (novel)

Plot

Aurelio Zen gets the posting he always dreaded—he has been sent to Sicily, home of the Mafia, albeit in what he takes to be a nondescript liaison job. Carla, the woman who is his adopted daughter is there too, setting up police computers and worrying that someone has a backdoor into data. Carla is also enjoying a flirtation with a heavily guarded woman magistrate whose pursuit of the Mafia is based on quite personal agendas.

Someone is left to die in an abandoned and locked metal wagon in a railway siding with a scrawled name as a clue. The local Mafia chiefs, the Limina clan, anxious to retain prestige, deny that it is their missing son; but many die for this murder that supposedly never happened. After the magistrate is murdered along with Zen's daughter, he discovers that a file left in his keeping points to irregularities in the murder investigation and a possible "third level" aiming to destabilise the powers of the old clans, raising many disconcerting questions.

Zen is thrown into what he recognises as a "fugue state", following some emotional hammer blows and exhibits some odd and obsessional behaviour. As if on the run, he seeks to lose himself but eventually he returns to Catania for a confrontation with a powerful Mafia Don in which his life is at stake. Determined to find his daughter's killer, Zen adds up the clues and realises murky political forces are involved that are bigger than both of them.

Review

Dibdin's picture of a Sicily full of death and confusion is evocative and plausible; Zen's initially reluctant pursuit of at least some part of the truth, some vestige of honour, is moving and powerful. This is an emotionally complex thriller in which the starkest of tragedy is counterpointed by outbreaks of bizarre comedy as Zen finds himself allies in unlikely places and the internal squabblings of the Mafia clans would be hilarious if they were not so blood-curdling.