If I needed one word to describe this book then it would be "slow" as the plot moves along at the pace of a snail crawling through a special snail glue designed to slow down snails. The central character in this book is Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen who works in Rome owever following the death of a fellow police officer he is assigned to desk duties and he is a bit of an embarressment to the authorities however the kidnapping of a wealthy industrialist Ruggiero Miletti opens up a window of opportunity for him and he is dispatched to Perugia to head up the investigation however an outsider rom Rome is not well received in the ...  Read the complete review

I had been looking for a new detective series to get my teeth into and after reading a couple of reviews on the Aurelio Zen character found within a series of books by Michael Dibdin I hoped that my search may have come to end and so I got hold of a copy of Ratking from my good friends at Amazon. Unfortunately I have to report that my search is not over after finding this to be a slow moving and not very inspiring read. There are a couple of positives that might make it appealing to some readers but I definitely found it to be far from a compelling read even if it did pick up a bit towards the end. The Plot The hero of the piece Police ...  Read the complete review

Introduction I've read a couple of books by Michael Dibdin over the last few months and both times have been really disappointed. Both started off well; but ended up drifting to and end in a very unsatisfactory way. Having been assured by quite a few people that Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series was much better than his non-series novels, I decided to persevere and luckily hit the jackpot this time. The first in the Aurelio Zen series, this book was written in 1988. For those of you that were wondering, a ratking is not the king of a pack of rats, but refers to the situation that evolves when rats breeding in close proximity to each other begin to entwine and ...  Read the complete review