Through a glass, darkly

A Long Finish by Michael Dibdin Faber & Faber, pounds 16.99, 256pp; Jane Jakeman savours a vintage performance from a maestro of murder

MICHAEL DIBDIN went off form in his last crime novel, Cosi fan Tutte. Its interminable Mozartian intrigue condemned the writer to a tour de force of plotting that bogged the book down, even as a parody of the detective-story narrative. He writes with such easy skill that he must get quickly bored, and tempted to show off the sleight of hand that can whisk his settings from one side of the world to the other, his characters from seedy Oxford language teachers to Neapolitan crooks.

Dibdin also sets himself an extraordinary variety of challenges: killings inside an obscure American cult, in the secret world of the Vatican, among the Mafiosi. His latest book is a distinguished contribution to wine-buff crime, a genre that probably started when the Duke of Clarence was tipped into the butt of Malmsey, and was given a gruesome edge by Edgar Allan Poe in his story The Cask of Amontillado.

A Long Finish does have the mandatory body in a barrel, but, more important, it returns to all the virtues that make Dibdin the best writer of crime fiction never to have won the Booker. Inspector Aurelio Zen is dispatched north to investigate the hideous death of a Piedmont wine producer, whose son has been charged with the murder. Zen's brief is to get the suspect out of jail so that the current harvest will not be endangered, and so that a fabulously wealthy connoisseur in Rome can add that year's vintage to the dusty wine-racks in his cellar.

In the process, Zen encounters the provincial community of Alba, with an array of extraordinary but believable characters. Here are all the small-town kindness and nastiness, the physicality of landscape, the clods of clay and oozing mists, the casual petty brutality that conspire to make the reader's flesh creep.

Dibdin is a master of the lean narrative, the elliptical and scalp-tingling implication of something just beyond the edge of vision. There's a scene where he carries off one of the most difficult tricks of all: letting the reader watch the unknowing detective sitting side by side with the killer, so that every nerve screams "behind you!" and the page-turning factor is irresistible.

Zen himself emerges as a deeper character. Here he's the centre of a sub-plot about his long-lost daughter and the social consequences of DNA testing, which is a finely balanced bit of tragi-comedy. And for those who are charmed by the outward magic of Tuscany, here's a reminder of the nasty side of rural life, including a spine-chilling peasant cottage with pet rats running around.

Jancis Robinson was Dibdin's advisor on viticulture, so he is convincingly deep into the intricacies of the trade, including the modern scams of buying generic wine and selling it as origine controllata, as well as atmospheric accounts of traditional cobwebby cellars and bottling operations. He has nosed into truffle-hunting as well - ounce for ounce, white truffles make uncut diamonds look cheap - dropping in all sorts of lore about the training of the hounds, as well as bits of peasant wisdom on food. (Eating lentils makes you rich: every one you eat will come back some day as a gold coin.)

The murders are motivated by Shakespearian passions, but they are believable in this stark landscape. Dibdin's writing has the earthy flavour of a murderous world - "le gout du terroir", as wine-buffs say - in spades.