The man is Aurelio Zen. The place is Venice, once his home, now the site of his reluctant homecoming. Zen is a member of the elite Italian Criminalpol squad stationed in Rome: a middle-aged man disgusted with - but begrudgingly resigned to - the political bog of corruption and cynicism within which he has to work. Intelligent, weary, urbane, pensive, Zen has been the complex heart of Michael Dibdin's most highly praised books. And now, he's back. He's back in Venice after a long absence, and under false pretenses: ostensibly to investigate the "haunting" of an old family friend but actually, and illegally, to find the body - dead or alive - of the missing patriarch of a wealthy American family. With no real authority and no leads, Zen is reminded that amid the shifting light and water of the lagoons, nothing is what it seems - not even the skeletal corpse discovered, unburied, on the Isle of the Dead. The questions of how and why it came to be there are shrouded in mystery, confusion, and an indeterminate but growing threat of violence. And they are questions that will inexorably draw Zen into a confrontation with the veiled, seemingly unknowable truths about his own life.