Aurelio Zen's allure is due to the fact that the novels effortlessly paint a sharper portrait of Italy than any guide-book, cookbook or academic history.

Zen is a pensive private eye, and since he's not the sort of man you could imagine ever breaking into a sprint, the pace of the books is fairly leisurely. There's a lot of time for Dibdin to drop in his - or Zen's - reflections on the state of the peninsula. He's a rather lonely figure who can't quite cut the umbilical cord that pulls like an elastic band to his ageing mother. Women find him attractive, but he's too modest, or working too hard, to notice. For much of the time his private and professional lives appear to be on the brink of ruin, until he snaps into gear and cynically starts solving both the crime and his impending personal crisis.

And Then You Die is the eighth Zen book. It's a complete inversion of the standard detective genre, because Zen himself is the intended murder victim. He has survived a botched mafia hit in Sicily, and is now lying low on a Tuscan beach (hence the title: life's a beach, and then you die). He's supposed to be going to America to testify in a mafia trial, but is terrorised by the thought of that clear-cut, Anglo-Saxon world. At least, he muses ironically, "you knew where you were in a Catholic culture: up to your neck in lies, evasions, impenetrable mysteries, double-dealing, back-stabbing and underhand intrigues of every kind". While awaiting the trial, Zen - never the pushy type - happily gives up his deckchair or plane reservation to others, who are then suddenly bumped off. His new mission, then, is less a hunt for the murderer than an attempt to avoid becoming the stiff himself. Finding the criminals implies saving his own life, and he is duly shunted from Tuscany to Iceland, back to Rome and finally to Tuscany again.
It isn't a traditional whodunnit, but something more subtle: we think we know whodunnit, but wonder if he'll be caught before the evidence disappears and the legal system is stitched up.

In the most recent chapter of this real-life thriller, the suspect has become the country's prime minister; each time he seems on the brink of arrest, his government passes legislation which lets him off the hook. Silvio Berlusconi has frequently inveighed against his collusion with the "powers that be" in Sicily (in the general election, Berlusconi won 61 out of the available 61 constituencies on the island). As ever in Italy, the only real clues to the suspect's guilt are the coincidences: that electoral result in Sicily, his recent refusal to sign a European Union accord against financial fraud, the fact that his first legislative act was to decriminalise false accounting and his second to put a bureaucratic spanner in the works of detectives investigating international financial fraud.