The Dying of the Light » (Reprint)

Michael Dibdin was born in England and raised in Northern Ireland. He attended Sussex University and the University of Alberta in Canada. He spent five years in Perugia, Italy, where he taught English at the local university. He went on to live in Oxford, England and Seattle, Washington. He was the author of eighteen novels, eleven of them in the popular Aurelio Zen series, including Ratking, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and Cabal, which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He died in 2007.

One of England's most acclaimed younger mystery writers, the creator of Detective Aurelio Zen, gives us a brilliant and haunting variation on the classic drawing-room murder novel. The setting is Eventide Lodge, where the guests have gathered for tea. Colonel Weatherby is reading by the fire. Mrs. Hargreave III is whiling away her time at patience. And Miss Rosemary Travis and her friend, Dorothy, are wondering which of their housemates will be the next to die.

For even as Michael Dibdin's elderly sleuths debate clues and motives, it becomes clear that Eventide Lodge is not a genteel country inn but a place of ghastly cruelties and humiliations. A place where the logic of murder is . . .almost comforting. At once affectionate homage and audacious satire, The Dying of the Light will delight any aficionado of Patricia Highsmith, Peter Dickinson, or Ruth Rendell.

Kirkus Reviews

Immured in a beastly nursing home run by smarmy William Anderson and his foulmouthed sister Letitia Davis, Rosemary Travis, abetted by her cooperative chum Dorothy Davenport, keeps her spirits up by embroidering the horrors of life at Eventide Lodge into a baroque Golden Age mystery plot—a plot that casts each of her innocuous fellow-geriatrics as a possible suspect when Hilary Bryant dies or George Channing attempts to escape and is mauled by Anderson's Doberman. But when Dorothy, on the eve of her departure for the hospital for terminal-cancer treatment, dies of a fantastic concoction of liquor and pills, Rosemary has a real-life mystery on her hands. Or does she? Did Dorothy really kill herself? Or was Anderson getting rid of her as expeditiously as possible? Or was the killer some other patient? Or is the whole plot one last fictional legacy of Dorothy's? Once again, Dibdin, author of Ratking and the Aurelio Zen novels (Vendetta, 1991, etc.), produces a tale as piercingly funny as Tom Stoppard—and as wise about the powers of fiction to deal with an unspeakable world.