The Nature of Things

Time for a trip to Venice to see what's happening with Commissario Guido Brunetti. It is spring in Venice and Guido is enjoying the early greening of the vegetation and the soft, sunny days of the season. He takes every opportunity he can to escape from his office at the Questura and bask in the sensual vernal pleasures. But, of course, as always happens, work has a way of interfering with Guido's pleasure. In this instance, it starts with his assistant Vianello asking him to intervene in a case in which a friend of his who is an environmental activist has been arrested during a protest. It turns out there really is no case against the man, Ribetti, and he is released. But as they are leaving the police station they encounter the man's father-in-law, Giovanni De Cal, who is the owner of a glass factory in Murano. De Cal despises his son-in-law and is furious with him for being arrested. He takes Ribetti's environmental activism as a personal affront. He accosts his son-...

Corruption is rampant in Donna Leon's Venice. Venetians might have invented quid pro quo . It seems impossible to get anything done there without one hand washing the other, so to speak.  That holds true for the police as well. That is the milieu in which Commissario Guido Brunetti must operate. It's what he must deal with to extract information, investigate crimes, and achieve justice for the victims. In fact, in these dark stories, there is very little justice achieved. Leon always manages to bring a bit of current-day politics into her tales which contributes to their feeling of verisimilitude. In this case, her reference is to refugees and immigrants from Africa that are coming into Italy, some legally and some illegally. Some of the men work as street vendors. They buy knock-off handbags and then resell them to customers on the streets after shops are closed for the day. The community is tolerant toward them. They seem harmless and don't cause any trouble. Then one of ...

I haven't visited Venice and the Brunetti family for a while, so let's hop a vaporetto and check out what the good Commissario Brunetti is up to. Well, it seems he's up to the same old thing - fighting the good fight (usually a losing fight) against the endemic corruption in Venetian and Italian society. This is the thirteenth in Donna Leon's popular series and it was published in 2004, so we are slowly getting closer to the current day. The case that is drawing Brunetti's attention this time around is the brutal murder of an old woman in her apartment. The murder had happened a few weeks before and had been quickly "solved" by the odious Lieutenant Scarpa. It was determined that the woman's Romanian carer had killed her and then she herself had been killed when struck by a train while fleeing police. Brunetti's fatuous superior, Patta, is, of course, delighted with the quick result. Then a neighbor who has been out of the country contacts the poli...

I've been quite happily plowing through Donna Leon's series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, enjoying his relationships with his family and his colleagues at the Questura, and especially enjoying all the descriptions of the food and wine consumed by the Brunetti family. But all of those pleasantries cannot completely disguise the fact that this is a very dark series. The title of this twelfth entry, Uniform Justice , could be read in different ways. The "uniform" might refer to the military which in this story comes in for a bollocking by the author. Or it might be read as ironic: There is no such thing as uniform justice; there is "justice" for the rich and a much less salubrious "justice" for the poor. However you read it or interpret it, it is a thoroughly depressing view of Venetian society and, taken in a larger sense, Western society as a whole. This book begins with Commissario Brunetti being called to investigate the death of a cadet a...

Claudia Leonardo is a student of English Literature at the university in Venice where Paolo Brunetti teaches. In class, Claudia is a very quiet young woman, seldom speaking, but the work that she presents to Professor Brunetti is exemplary. She shows an extraordinary understanding of the material and a particular admiration for Paolo's own literary hero, Henry James.  Paolo surmises that anyone with such an appreciation of James must be extremely intelligent.  Thus, when Claudia lingers after class one day and asks to speak with Paolo, she is prepared to give her her full attention.  Claudia is aware that Paolo is married to a policeman, Commissario Guido Brunetti, and she wants her to ask her husband a question. She wants to know whether there is a process for obtaining a pardon for a long-dead individual who was convicted of a crime, perhaps unjustly. Paolo answers that she doesn't think her husband can answer the question without more information about what the crime w...

This one was perfect. It was my comfort read and it provided everything that I needed just when I needed it. Visits with Commissario Brunetti and his families - both his own and his work family - are like that, but this one was even better than most. It begins on the island of Pellestrina on the Venetian lagoon. Two clam fishermen, a father and son, have been found murdered on their fishing boat.  The older man's head had been caved in by a couple of brutal blows and the younger had been knifed in the stomach and bled to death. But that wasn't the end of it. In the middle of the night, the community was awakened by a loud boom as the boat's gas tank exploded and enveloped it in flames. The flames spread to the boats moored on either side and things looked very dicey for a while until the other fishermen managed to get things under control and extinguish the conflagration. When the neighbors finally realized that the owners of the burnt boat were missing, someone thought ...

Donna Leon has a new book in her Guido Brunetti series. It is the 28th book in the series. It opened on The New York Times best sellers list.  It sounds interesting and I would really like to read it, but I am committed to reading the books of the series in order and I'm only up to number nine. At the rate I am going, it will be years before I can legitimately read number twenty-eight. On the bright side, that means that I have a lot of entertaining reading ahead of me. My pleasure in reading this series has increased with just about every book I have read. That trend continued with Friends in High Places, published in 1999. This book once again features the pervasive corruption that is so much a part of Venetian society, at least in Leon's fictional Venice. Commissario Brunetti receives a visit from an official from the Officio Castato, the registrar of buildings in Venice. He is there to determine if there was a permit for the construction of Brunetti's apartment on t...

Paola Brunetti is a woman who feels injustice keenly. Particularly when that injustice is dealt to innocent children. She has recently become aware that travel agencies in her own city of Venice are selling sex tours to Southeast Asia. These sex tours offer children as their objects. Children are being raped for the pleasure of sick, rich men. Paola feels a compulsion to act. The travel agencies are not technically breaking any Venetian or Italian law; their transgression is against morality. Paola decides to protest in a way that will get the attention of the agencies and, she hopes, the public. And so, in the early morning hours one day, she goes to the local travel agency with a very large rock which she hurls through the front window, setting off the burglar alarm. Then she sits down on a bench and waits to be arrested. The two local gendarmes show up and question her about what happened, asking her if she can describe the vandal. She offers them a description and, at length, t...

These Donna Leon books featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police have become some of my favorite guilty reading pleasures over the past year. Time to squeeze in one more before the year ends! A Noble Radiance is the seventh in the series and once again it highlights the corruption and intrigue which seem to be hallmarks of public life in Italy - at least in public life as told by Donna Leon. The plot begins with the discovery of a body, not an unusual event in a murder mystery. In this case, the body is that of a young man, long dead and mostly decomposed. The body is discovered when an abandoned and derelict farm in a village near Venice is purchased by a German doctor from Munich as a retirement home. He starts the process of renovating and upgrading the house and the land around it. As one of the fields is being plowed, the plow uncovers the remains which had been in a shallow grave. The case is assigned to Brunetti. Along with the body, a ring is discovered. The ri...

Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venetian police is approached by a young woman who looks familiar but whom he can't quite place and who wants to tell him about what she fears has been happening at a nursing home where she recently worked. Only after she identifies herself does he realize that she was a nun who once cared for his mother at the nursing home where she is a patient. She had subsequently left that nursing home and worked at another, the one about which she is reporting to him. But then she grew disillusioned with life as a nun and left the Order to take up a secular life. She's no longer dressed in a nun's habit which is why he didn't recognize her. What the young woman reports to Brunetti is her concern about the deaths of some of her former patients. Their deaths were somewhat unexpected and she believes they may have been helped along. All of the individuals were wealthy and she believes they may have been influenced to make their wills in favor of the ...

I needed a reading palate cleanser - a quick and easy read to bridge the gap between two more serious literary works. I decided to go with one of Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti mysteries, a series that I've discovered fairly recently. It has provided dependable reading pleasure. Acqua Alta is the fifth book in the series. The title, meaning "high water," refers to a time during full moon in winter when tides bring the waters of the Adriatic into Venice, inundating the barriers meant to hold it back and sloshing into the ground floors of buildings. This phenomenon, aided and abetted by torrential winter rains, creates hazardous conditions in the city. It is during one of these events that Brett Lynch, the American archaeologist that we met in the first Brunetti mystery, Death at La Fenice , is accosted in her own home and severely beaten by two "gentlemen from the South," a phrase used to denote that organization which must not be named by Venetians but w...

The political corruption and public moral depravity faced by Commissario Guido Brunetti as he attempts to do his job of maintaining law and order in his beloved city of Venice are utterly disheartening and demoralizing. Even just reading about them is disheartening and demoralizing. The depths to which human beings eagerly sink in order to gratify their desires or to enrich or empower themselves is, quite simply, horrifying.  At one time in the not too distant past, I could have read these stories with more dispassion and objectivity. But today a society's descent into moral turpitude where the rich and powerful are able to befoul the water, air, and soil and to use defenseless fellow human beings in whatever way they choose just hits a bit close to home. Consequently, although I am as charmed as ever by Guido and his family, I found this fourth book in the series difficult reading. The plot revolves around human trafficking. A group of powerful and influential men in Italy are bri...

A dead body is found in a field near a slaughterhouse in Marghera, near Venice. At first glance, it appears to be one of the prostitutes who work the area around the abbatoir. But on examination, it turns out to be a man dressed in a woman's red dress and underwear and red silk shoes. The victim has been beaten about the head and face so badly that he is rendered unrecognizable. When his gender is discovered, the assumption becomes that he is a transvestite prostitute and the investigation of the death at first proceeds on that theory. But you know what they say about assuming things... It is the middle of August when all of this happens, vacation time for Italians. Commissario Guido Brunetti and his family have plans to escape the oppressive heat of Venice for two weeks on a refreshing trip to the mountains where, even in mid-summer, sweaters are required. Then he gets "the call." He has been assigned to head the investigation of this appalling murder. His wife and child...

I read a lot of mysteries on our recent vacation. This was one of them. This was the second in Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti series.  Although two is not a large sample, I am very much enjoying these stories so far. Brunetti is a very likable chap and I especially enjoy his relationship with his family and the fact that the family is shown as an integral part of his life. It's not something one always finds in one's favorite fictional detectives and it gives an added resonance to the tales.  The death referred to in the title is the death of an American soldier stationed at a nearby base at Vicenza. His body is found floating in a Venetian canal. He had been stabbed and it appears that his death may have been the result of a mugging gone wrong. But Brunetti finds reasons to be skeptical of that explanation. Sgt. Michael Foster was a public health inspector at the army base and Guido suspects that his death may somehow be related to his job. Perhaps he had uncovered prob...

In 1992, Donna Leon's first mystery featuring Commissario of Police Guido Brunetti was published. Since then, she has written twenty-six more, the twenty-seventh one due for publication in March. That is remarkable prolificacy of more than one book a year. If they all provide as pleasurable a read as the first one, Death at La Fenice , I can certainly understand the popularity of the series.  This was recommended to me because I enjoy reading mystery series and several of the series that I have been following for years are ending, or else I am overtaking the writers and waiting impatiently for them to produce their next book. So I have vacancies in my reading schedule that need filling. Enter Guido Brunetti/Donna Leon. All of these mysteries are set in Venice where the author, born in America, has lived for many years. The city itself is a major character, or at least it was in this first book. Some of the best parts of the book are the writer's descriptions of the city, its at...