This kind of came and went and I don’t know what else to say about it. It starts off plodding, the pace picks up about a third through, and then it trundles along fine and then it’s over.

The setup is this: Aurelio Zen, a washed-up investigator based in Rome, is sent to Perugia to investigate a kidnapping that’s taking a bafflingly long time to resolve, given that the kidnappers and the family have been negotiating about a ransom for ages. Zen starts to suspect that one or some of the victim’s four children, plus or minus other people close to them, are conspiring to sabotage the negotiations. He also suspects that some or all of the local police, magistrates, and general public would also rather he didn’t succeed. He does in the end, of course.

This is all done well enough, and larded with enough Italian cliché to keep the sense of place intact, but somehow it feels like it ought to be better, more lingering. Maybe the characterisation is a bit too dense, maybe the plotting is a bit too obvious while also being too complicated, maybe the clichés are a bit too clichéd. Or maybe, you know, this is all fine. A fairly frictionless, effortless read that slides smoothly away. Not obvious that that should be award-winning material, but it’s an achievement all the same.