An old hand at postmodern literary play, Ciabattari is one writer who could claim charter membership in the Pirandello and Calvino schools of literary humor, and if his first three Rizzoli books were not sufficiently persuasive, you'd have no choice but to recognize his important contribution to literature by the time you got to his latest Rizzoli novel, When the Mask Slips. From the Afterword by Fred Gardaphé