Consider: this, like the others, is published by Faber and Faber, which automatically bestows a certain prestige when the broadsheet reviewers comes a'knocking. A publisher with a pedigree, and one willing to finance that authorial grail: the hardback printing. Dibdin, it says, is a serious writer.

And Dibdin can write. If you've ever read any of the Zens you can testify to that. On a basic level - words in front of other words, nicely milled sentences, elegant paragraphs - he'll turn in an entirely proficient job. But that's not at issue, not when he's authoring books as anaemic, as thoughtlessly bland as A Long Finish. It sets up a cast of exotically monkiered Italians and some mildly diverting plot details about wine and murder and patriarchy and family, and resolves them neatly. It's superior mystery spinning of a kind that, even under her own name, Ruth Rendell can do in her sleep. It's writing that never gets its hands dirty.

Psychologically Dibdin can't hold a candle to Barbara Vine or even (on TV rather the page) Morse, and his characterisation is lamentable racked against, say, fellow countryman John Harvey. (For all the bumbling pretension, Aurelio Zen is a mere aperitif to Resnick's meaty desperation.) The humour is staid and middle-class, and for a book with such an exotic setting, a sense of place of woefully lacking.

This very polite, very professional book is at least better than his alleged 'thriller' Dark Spectre, but is as equally unsatisfying as either crime writing or contemporary fiction. On this evidence, Aurelio Zen, if not Dibdin himself, would do well to retire quietly from the game.