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How long does it take to read A Long Finish?

Michael Dibdin

A Long Finish by Michael Dibdin takes about 4 hours 59 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

Book 6 of Aurelio Zen

Previous: Vendetta

About 4 hours 59 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1998. 272 pages, about 74,800 words.

10 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 19 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 59 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 7 minutes

The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Ratking, Vendetta, Cabal, Dead Lagoon, Cosi Fan Tutti--in each of these masterfully suspenseful and atmospheric novels we have met Michael Dibdin's Italian Criminalpol officer Aurelio Zen. Intelligent and urbane (if a little weary), Zen galvanizes us not only with his ability to solve the most intractable crimes but also with his methodology. He is both devious and moral, a slave to the status quo and original in his thinking, amused by his own tor-por and surprised by his drive. Now, in The Long Finish, he is driven by something new: a steelyinstinct for self-preservation coupled with a love of good food and wine. After a riotous and heroic stint in Naples, Zen is back in Rome, meeting with a world-famous film director at the instruction of his superiors. In the privacy of a remarkably well stocked wine cellar, the director--whose influence clearly reaches beyond the entertainment industry--convinces Zen to arrange for the release of the scion of an important wine-growing family, who has been jailed for the murder of his own father. At stake for the director, a connoisseur of Piedmontese wines, is this year's vintage: only the jailed man can ensure the timely harvesting of his family's precious grapes. At stake for Zen: avoiding a posting to the dreaded Sicily.In Alba--an outwardly serene village set among rolling hills that are planted with vines for as far as the eye can see--Zen discovers that only spilled blood can separate a family from its land. And though murder here is rare, it is complex. But at least it's accompanied by heaping plates of pasta, generous shavings of white truffles, and bottomless glasses of wine. If only Zen can keep his policing skills as sharp as his palate is pampered. . . .From the Hardcover edition.

Subjects: Fiction, Police, Aurelio Zen (Fictitious character), Wine and wine making, Detective and mystery stories, Mystery

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