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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780679768548
ISBN number: 0679768548
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 272
Printing Date: April 29, 1997
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: April 29, 1997
Sale Popularity Level: 230581
Studio: Vintage
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Product Description:
In this masterpiece of psychological suspense, Italian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen is dispatched to investigate the kidnapping of Ruggiero Miletti, a powerful Perugian industrialist. But nobody much wants Zen to succeed: not the local authorities, who view him as an interloper, and certainly not Miletti's children, who seem content to let the head of the family languish in the hands of his abductors -- if he's still alive.
Was Miletti truly the victim of professionals? Or might his kidnapper be someone closer to home: his preening son Daniele, with his million-lire wardrobe and his profitable drug business? His daughter, Cinzia, whose vapid beauty conceals a devastating secret? The perverse Silvio, or the eldest son Pietro, the unscrupulous fixer who manipulates the plots of others for his own ends? As Zen tries to unravel this rat's nest of family intrigue and official complicity, Michael Dibdin gives us one of his most accomplished thrillers, a chilling masterpiece of police procedure and psychological suspense.
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Rated by buyers 
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Ratking by Michael Dibdin
Michael Dibdin introduced Italian police detective Aurelio Zen in the Ratking and carried off the 1988 Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. An industrialist has been kidnapped in Perugia and the powers-that-be want a high-powered detective sent up from Rome to solve the crime. In mad rush of bureaucratic CYA, the police in Rome dispatch Auerlio Zen. The joke is that Zen is a has-been, blamed for the bungled end of the Aldo Moro kidnapping some four years earlier.
Dibdin develops a complex crime scenario. Is the entire kidnapping a fake, a put up job? Is the industrialist's messed up family behind the kidnapping? Why does the family not cooperate with the police? Can Zen arrange for his safe return? If not, will Zen end up back in his duties in Rome?
Zen likens the family to a 'ratking' and whether you believe that ratkings actually exist in nature, these folks are the real thing (look it up - I won't spoil the surprise).
Dibdin, however, does not stop with a mere police mystery, but develops a multi-layered story. He presents a largely dysfunctional Italian society where few people work much or very hard, certainly no more than absolutely necessary. Every individual is subject to power exercised often arbitrarily by nearly everyone else - and that's the trade-off; everyone gets at least a little power to lord over anyone wandering into their bailiwick. And Dibdin also begins to develop Zen as a complex character whose American expat girlfriend resents his sudden involvement in real police work, who lives with his mother, and who mourns the loss of a father he never really knew. In Dibdin's obit (he died in 2007), the Guardian observed that the Ratking's plot existed mainly for the presentation of "mordant dialogue and world-weary observation".
The story did drag at times; perhaps it suffered a bit from setting up Zen's back story, which took the reader away from the main story. One assumes the reader's patience will be rewarded in the remaining ten Zen novels. I look forward to reading Vendetta (Zen), the second book in the series. Highly recommended.
Rated by buyers 
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First in Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series.
A terrific start to an extremely well-written detective series, set in various places in Italy (this one in Perugia). It is a very good idea to start at the beginning and read the series in order, unless you don't mind obtaining mosaic-like insights into the motivations, psychology and personal relationships of the almost-but-not-quite 'anti-hero' Zen. The outcomes of previous cases are discussed in subsequent books, which could prove to spoil earlier ones for a non-sequential reader.
Dibdin conveys the Italian settings well - you can almost feel yourself walking alongside Zen through the piazzas of Rome and the precipitous streets of Perugia.
Zen is not another Commissario Brunetti (Donna Leon's equally as engaging Venetian detective). Zen's psychology is much darker, his demons more active, his personality more brittle and his relationships more fragile. Above all, his morality is more able to cope with (and indulge in) matters not always just 'shady', but sometimes downright illegal. Dibdin does successfully capture, however, the Italian body politic with both its unbending public bureaucracy and more flexible private state.
For an intelligent police procedural, with well-drawn characters, and a wonderful sense of place, I heartily recommend Ratking as a wonderful series opener.
Rated by buyers 
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Many readers would take the word at face value, and assume a ratking is in fact a king rat. This is far from the case. A ratking is created when too many rats live together in a small space, and their tails become intertwined. They create a new, living organism where all must work together for the survival of all.
The Italian Miletti family has created such a world. The four children of the senior member, who has been kidnapped, must contrive together to protect their interests both against each other and the outside world - particularly inspector Aurelio Zen, newly arrived from Rome to solve the puzzle. But when Miletti is found murdered, after the kidnappers have received their ransom, the ratking must somehow adapt to ensure its survival, and Zen must figure out its secrets to solve the mystery.
While the premise of this book was interesting enough, and the depictions of Italian life in Perugia were well-done, I didn't particularly enjoy the writing style of the book, nor the casual ending to the story. I've tried several of Dibdain's books, and don't think I'll be coming back.
Rated by buyers -
Dibdin's fifty year old Aurelio Zen is trapped like a rat within the law enforcement tunnel of the labyrinth that is the Italian bureaucracy. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time has resulted in a forgotten desk job in Rome where Venetian Zen stares at a phone that never rings. When he is suddenly summonsed to Perugia in the lush Umbrian countryside and placed as lead inspector in a notable electronics magnate's kidnapping, he gets the sense, as we do, that something other than his immediate involvement in the investigation is at work here. Nevertheless, Zen does his job and as he gathers his information, we observe Zen's world of family, friends and Italy from Zen's cynical eyes. After playing the scapegoat once, Zen is wary; he has learned his lesson and has learned it well. Understanding the system as painfully and personally as he has, Zen adapts, manipulates and manages to sever the rat tails of the investigation's ratking while simultaneouly reconnecting himself to the tangle of tails which form the ratking of the Italian Law Enforcement machine.
The mystery here, is secondary to Zen's tainted vision of the world. It acts a conduit to expose Zen's feelings about the present and the past. His mantra, if he has one, could be paraphrased: A man must compromise in order to survive. Dibdin's humorous portrayals of the Italian populace of Umbria, most notably, the Miletti siblings and the Naopolitan driver, are priceless. The reader gets a real sense of the city state mentality of Italy, where there are definite prejudices between Northerners and Southerners. Dibdin's countless behind-the-scenes suggestions of corruption, wire-tapping and self-sustaining acts of betrayal seem too farfetched to be thought solely fictional.
The tone of the story is cynical and dark which makes for some tedious reading. The reader finds himself in his own rat tail tangle of misunderstanding. Zen, a reluctant realist, must deal with an American girlfriend who does not understand his need to keep the details of his relationship with her a secret from his live-in mother. He's got some issues with his father that come to light while he ponders the ties between the Miletti patriarch and his children. Along with the bungled career, there is an ex-wife, an abandoned home in Venice and a lifetime of smaller regrets. In short, he is no designer detective in an Armani suit with wise-guy retorts; he is real and has real problems.
As the very first in a series of Zen mysteries, I think this one a worthy introduction and I look forward to seeing how the character manages to survive in the murky environment of real life.
Rated by buyers -
This is the very first book in Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series. It's a fine story that marks a good introduction to this series. You learn just enough during the course of the stories to want to learn more, which you do in future installments. It sets the template for what is to come: Zen is given a case that no one really wants solved, there is trouble. Good, solid mystery with many interesting secondary charracters. Read the first, you will continue to the last. Maybe not compulsively but steadily.
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