Ratking (novel)

Ratking is a 1988 novel by Michael Dibdin, and is the first book in the popular Aurelio Zen series, introducing readers to the Italian police commissario's morally shady world. On publication it won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for fiction.

Ratking
First edition
AuthorMichael Dibdin
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SeriesAurelio Zen series, #1
GenreCrime, Mystery novel
PublisherFaber and Faber
Publication date
April 5, 1988
Media typePrint (Hardback, Paperback)
Pages288 pp (hardback) 292 (paperback)
ISBN0-571-15147-7
OCLC17262947
Followed byVendetta 

Plot

Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. From the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome counting paperclips, to which he has been exiled through political fallout from the Aldo Moro kidnapping and murder, he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia. Unbeknownst to him, favours have been called in and words have been whispered into ears. He is to take over a kidnapping case involving one of Italy's most powerful families, with control of a business empire at stake. The missing head of the family is a big benefactor of one of Italy's main political parties and pressure is being applied. Zen contends with local power politics and troubled relationships with his mother and girlfriend, while employing some distinctly unorthodox methods and skirting the borderline of the permissible in a race to get results before he is removed from the case through political pressure.

TV adaptation

The novel was adapted for television by the BBC, starring Rufus Sewell in the title role. It was aired in January 2011.

gollark: Also, I seem to have unfathomably lost a program I need, this is HIGHLY troubling.
gollark: I think that if your system can't be deployed without being used everywhere at once, it's utter bees and should not occur.
gollark: Living standards have still consistently increased for pretty much everyone for ages, governments are the ones going to war and covertly operating and you can't really get around this given the existence of scarcity, worldwide extreme poverty is declining and literacy is increasing, etc.
gollark: And yet it somewhat works ish, apparently better than many of the things called "communism" over the æges.
gollark: Such forms of communism seem impräctical.


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