January 15th, 1993, marked a turning point in the Italian government's war against Cosa Nostra. The arrest on that date of Salvatore "The Beast" Riina, the head of the powerful Coreleonese mafia of Palermo, sent out a clear message that sections of the government were finally serious about tackling organised crime.
As a result, key witnesses began, for the first time, to discuss what they knew about the Cosa Nostra's political allies. Allegations of collusion, combined with revelations of more general corruption, eventually led to a situation where one-third of the national parliament and half of the Sicilian parliament were under some form of criminal investigation, including the Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti. The claims of the mafia witnesses appeared to confirm what many Italians had long suspected: the existence of a network of political allegiances to Cosa Nostra, the so-called terzo livello or Third Level.
The activities, real or imagined, of the Third Level provide much of the backdrop for Blood Rain, the latest of Michael Dibdin's mysteries to feature the Italian police detective, Aurelio Zen. Dibdin has always been among the most intelligent of crime writers, and Zen is one of the most interesting detective creations of the last ten years, despite the unfortunate hiccup that was 1997's Cosi Fan Tutti. With Blood Rain, Dibdin has now written the darkest instalment in the Zen series, and one that is likely to fans reeling.
Blood Rain finds Zen in semi-exile in the mafia stronghold of Catania, Sicily, reduced to spying for the Interior Ministry on the activities of the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia, the specialist inter-departmental group sometimes referred to as the Italian FBI. The arrival of his recently adopted daughter Carla Arduini, who is installing a computer system for the DIA, offers Zen some consolation, until Carla learns that someone is using the system to illegally access the DIA's records. This knowledge, combined with her growing friendship with the anti-mafia judge Corinna Nunziatella, places all three of them in mortal danger.
To say any more would be to spoil a novel that offers the reader at least two gut-wrenching twists and a body-count that moves fairly effortlessly into double figures. This is a brooding, almost nightmarish, work, leavened by a little awkward humour involving a boatload of Arsenal supporters and Zen's own shambling appeal. Midway through Blood Rain, Zen picks up some British and American detective novels which, he notes, provide "a tightly organised guided tour through a theme park of reassuringly foreign unpleasantness, and concluding with a final chapter in which the truth was laid bare and the guilty party identified and duly punished." Dibdin offers us no such reassurance. Instead, with Blood Rain, he has created a superb, disturbing work of crime fiction that will stay with the reader for long after the book is, finally, closed.
John Connolly's novel, Every Dead Thing, has just been published in paperback by Coronet