RATKING

When a wealthy industrialist is kidnapped from his home in the Italian countryside, Aurelio Zen is given the task of getting him back. Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before, and lost, and the tight-knit community into which he must pry seems confident that they can manipulate him to their own agendas - of which returning the kidnapped man, does not seem as high a priority as it should…

VENDETTA

An eccentric, famous and hideously rich recluse, takes pleasure in videoing the exploits of his honoured guests, so when one of his infamous private parties – held in his exclusive, highly fortified Sardinian palace – is turned into a massacre by an unseen assailant with a shotgun – the whole incident is recorded on tape, and Aurelio Zen is given the unenviable task of going to Sardinia to investigate. But he isn’t alone. Someone is following him, out for blood. And only Zen’s will do…

CABAL

When a well-to-do gentleman falls to his death – somewhat unexpectedly – from the dome of St. Peters in Rome during mass, it appears like suicide. Zen is called in by the Vatican authorities to brush the matter under the carpet as quickly as possible, but when an eye-witness’s to the fall begin to die, another explanation becomes apparent, one involving a secret organisation that call themselves the "Cabal"

DEAD LAGOON

Aurelio Zen returns home to his native Venice to investigate the death of an ex-patriot American. But things have changed since his last visit, and he soon finds himself up to his neck in a mire of assault, murder and murky politics.

COSI FAN TUTTI

Naples, notorious for its corruption and violence, and Aurelio Zen is feeling right at home. But there are other things on his mind. Murder is one, but romance is another – and Zen finds himself in the curious position of playing cupid in a bizarre reworking of a certain opera…

LONG FINISH

Aurelio Zen finds himself back in Rome, sneezing in a damp wine cellar and being given another unorthodox assignment - to release the jailed scion of an important wine-growing family.

BLOOD RAIN

Inspector Zen receives the order he has been dreading all his professional life: his next posting is to Sicily. Against the backdrop of the 3000-year-old city of Catania, Aurelio Zen is at his most desperate and driven. He will need all his cunning and skill just to survive.

AND THEN YOU DIE

After months in hospital recovering from a bomb attack on his car, Zen is lying low under a false name at a beach resort on the Tuscan coast, waiting to testify in an imminent anti-Mafia trial. He has clear instructions: to sit back and enjoy the classic Italian beach holiday - lying in the sun in his assigned chair on a well-managed strip of pale sand, eating seafood and engaging in a little mild flirtation with the attractive woman sitting under the next umbrella. But Zen is getting restless, and as an alarming number of people are dropping dead around him, it seems just a matter of time before the Mafia manage to finish the job they bungled months before on a lonely Sicilian road.

MEDUSA

When a group of Austrian cavers exploring a network of abandoned military tunnels in the Italian Alps come across human remains at the bottom of a deep shaft, everyone assumes the death was accidental--until the still unidentified body is stolen from the morgue and the Defence Ministry puts a news blackout on the case. And is the recent car bombing in Campione D'Italia, a tiny tax haven surrounded on all sides by Switzerland, somehow related? The whole affair has the whiff of political intrigue. That's enough to interest Aurelio Zen's boss at the Interior Ministry, who wants to know who is hiding what from whom and why. The search for the truth leads Zen back into the murky history of post-war Italy and obscure corners of modern-day society to uncover the truth about a crime that everyone thought was as dead and buried as the victim.

ZEN OMNIBUS

A single-volume edition of three of the crime novels featuring Italian detective Aurelio Zen: Ratking, Vendetta and Cabal.

THE LAST SHERLOCK HOLMES STORY

With the faithful Dr. Watson in attendance, Sherlock Holmes answers the call of Scotland Yard and seeks to uncover the identity of a brutal murderer of young women in London's East End, a killer known as Jack the Ripper.

THE TRYST

Psychiatrist Aileen Macklin's marriage to a man she met at Sussex University in the 1960s is under strain. She is called to attend to young Gary Dunn who is in and out of trouble. She is drawn mysteriously towards him as he reminds her of her past.

DIRTY TRICKS

Teaching English as a foreign language in a seedy school on the other side of Oxford to the dreaming spires and universities, the un-named narrator begins an affair with the wife of an acquaintance, leading to whirlwind of sex, death and fast cars.

THE DYING OF LIGHT

In a prison-like nursing home in Middle England, a pair of elderly ladies keep themselves sane by constructing intricate Agatha Christie-esque murder mysteries involving their unsuspecting fellow inmates. But then tragedy strikes, and the line between fantasy and reality becomes fatally blurred…

DARK SPECTER

People are being murdered systematically throughout America. Bound with tape, and executed with a single bullet, there seems to be no connection between the victims other than the manner of their death. With no evidence, no witnesses and no motives, how can any individual case be solved? And what has all this got to do with the poetry of William Blake and the long lost secret of the Templars?

A RICH, FULL DEATH

Robert Booth is a young Bostonian, who makes his way to Florence to meet Robert and Elizabeth Browning. But Browning is called away, and as Booth follows him, he stumbles across the body of his childhood sweetheart, hanging from a tree...

PICADOR BOOK OF CRIME WRITING

A compilation of classic short stories and extracts from famous novels, dealing with such thorny issues as committing the crime and dealing with the body. Edited with a commentary by Michael Dibdin.

THANKSGIVING

A darkly erotic novel of jealousy and obsession. After his wife's death, British journalist Anthony Baines becomes obsessed with her life before he met her, and travels to the Nevada desert in search of her first husband.