But putting aside the good and the bad, let’s talk about what Aurelio Zen is all about.

Indeed what author Michael Dibdin is or was all about. 

First, taking End Games as a work of fiction, an adventure, and a thriller if you will, a passing bit of enjoyable reading and we assume entertainment, the storyline takes us to southern Italy, the Calabria region, an area steeped in ancient history and ritual and chuck full of dark secrets, secrets of the kind that outsiders should avoid and shouldn’t care to dig into.  But, and there is always a but, an American lawyer comes into the picture, even if only briefly because a kidnapping occurs and said attorney is soon a corpse.

Thus Zen enters the scenario, once again assigned to a part of Italy he generally doesn’t visit, and begins an investigation into what happened.  A simple enough tale, however considering the ten previous novels in this series, the story becomes Zen’s 11^th step into the unknown, both the territory in which he must operate, the people he must work with, strangers all, and the pros and mostly cons of a decline in what was once a thriving culture, but which has now become a center of uncertainty if not downright misery.

Using the character Aurelio Zen, as he has done before, in End Games author Dibdin makes appropriate but often caustic observations about Italy’s (in this case southern Italy’s) sometimes peculiar ways.  This is where Michael Dibdin concentrates his best writing efforts, bringing to life a people that he, during his lifetime, came to know so well.  Like different kinds of ice cream, the population he talks about springs to life in a wide variety of flavors.  Without fully being aware of it, we find ourselves becoming a real part of living the daily life of the men and women we read about. 

Dibdin was brought up n Northern Ireland, attended Sussex University, then took a master’s degree in Edmonton, Canada.  He taught at the university in Perugia, Italy for four years.  First trying his hand at the novel in l978, he soon settled into a writing career producing the eleven Zen suspense novels as well as several other mystery books as well.

He lived his final years in Seattle, Washington.  After a brief illness, he died in 2007.