End Games, by Michael Dibdin

Michael Dibdin's untimely death earlier this year robbed British crime fiction of one of its most distinguished and distinctive voices. He was best-known for his Aurelio Zen series set in Italy. Published posthumously, End Games is the latest, and probably the last, instalment.

World-weary and oddly disengaged from his surroundings, Zen is not like other policemen. Temporarily posted to Calabria in the remote toe of Italy, he is marking time as chief of police in Cosenza, a place that makes him feel "seriously foreign". The kidnapping of a visiting American lawyer forces him reluctantly into action.

The plot thickens when the American turns out to be the scion of a landowning family that sweated its wealth from the local peasantry for generations. It thickens further when his mutilated corpse is discovered among the ruins of his ancestor's former palace in a deserted hilltop town in the Aspromonte massif, eternal bandit country. Newman's son, an innocent abroad who until now knew nothing of his father's Italian ancestry, comes to Calabria.

Meanwhile, another strand of the narrative deals with the reason for the lawyer's visit. Rapture Works, a wealthy West Coast computer-games company, is funding the production of a Biblical film in the region ("if you think the Crucifixion was big, wait till you see the Apocalypse"). Naturally, all is not what it seems. The film project is merely an elaborate cover for a sinister project to plunder wealth that has lain undisturbed for centuries. Examined in cold blood, as it were, the plot is not entirely plausible, but this does not matter. Dibdin grounds it in convincing details.

As usual, he is brilliant at evoking without sentimentality or censure both the physicality of an Italian region and the characteristics of its inhabitants. Where it's needed, he drops in the technological detail of investigation and surveillance with just the right air of knowing authority. His characters, even the minor ones, are evoked with sharp-edged definition. The dark, assured narrative constantly keeps the reader guessing about what is happening, where, and to whom.

The novel is stuffed with sly humour ("the aisle was full of noises") and the prose is as precise and versatile as ever. Dibdin uses crime fiction as a vehicle for satire. He has enormous fun with the film business, and so do we. He also has an extraordinarily good grasp of an idiotic type of Californian dialogue, with euphemism and cliché that cloaks a banality of thought, and greed and ruthlessness verging on the psychopathic.

In a typical scene, mass murder is planned as a shrewd business move – "You mean like permadeath?" – while a "service dude" is offering "seaweed ice cream made from llama's milk". "Too dumb to be human," a Rapture Works employee muses about his boss in a case of the pot calling the kettle black, "too fucked up to be a machine". It sounds like an epitaph for an aspect of American mass culture.

End Games offers ample testimony that Dibdin was at the height of his powers when he died. As with all his best work, it probes deeply and skilfully into its subject; it's beautifully written, tense, thought-provoking and very funny. Dibdin's novels will be sorely missed.

Andrew Taylor's latest crime novel is 'Naked to the Hangman' (Hodder & Stoughton)

Faber & Faber £12.99 (335pp) £11.50 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897