Donna Leon "Death and Judgment"

Corruption, and how far up the national and provincial pecking orders, are a constant theme through Donna Leon’s Brunetti mysteries, and there’s a particularly chilling example of how far at the end of Death and Judgment (also known as A Venetian Reckoning)

Having resolved the circumstances surrounding two obvious murders and an apparent suicide in the early hours of the morning Brunetti, dog tired, retreats home for a few hours’ sleep before he tidies up the formal side of things. He’s got a culprit, and a confession, the suspect’s safely locked up so everything ought to be cut and dried.

Six hours later he’s back at the Questura, only to find there had been a phone call from the Ministry of Justice in the meantime and some men from Special Branch showed up with some papers three hours earlier with orders to transfer the prisoner to Padua.

Earlier he’d written a short report, giving the substance of his conversations with the prisoner, and left it for Vice-Questore Patta or his acolyte Lieutenant Scarpa.  The prisoner suicides in a cell in Padua, nothing can be proved, and the breach of standard procedure gives Patta an excuse to tear strips off Brunetti. That’s a bit rich when there would seem to be only two sources who could have passed the details on to the higher ups...

And earlier, when the evidence at autopsy reveals a level of barbiturates in the apparent suicide’s bloodstream inconsistent with the perceived circumstances the official report on the procedure sees the quantity halved with the coroner’s notes and the relevant samples having gone missing.

Death and Judgment starts with one of those incidents that don’t appear to be tied in with the solution to the case by providing the motive for the murder. In this case the incident involves a crash where a truck carrying a load of timber crashes off a snow covered road in the in the Dolomite mountains of northern Italy, spilling its load, which includes eight unidentified women across the mountain side.

The murder, or at least the first of three murders, has a prominent lawyer shot on an express train from Torino, with the body being found as the train crosses the lagoon heading in to Venice. Carlo Trevisan was an expert on international law, is apparently a clean, family man and there’s no obvious reason why anyone would want him dead. Since the corpse still has his wallet, you can rule out robbery as a motive. He’s also a friend of the mayor and his wife is the secretary of the Lions Club, so when Patta assigns him the case Brunetti is instructed to use the utmost discretion.

Two days later his accountant, who also happens to be his brother-in-law is found dead in his car, shot three times, at close range, apparently by someone who was sitting beside him in the front seat.

In between those two there’s the apparent suicide and about the only thing Brunetti and his colleagues have to go on are a list of phone numbers in his address book that don’t have names beside them. One is Trevisan’s and another is a seedy bar that links both to a network of slave traders and pornographers that reaches beyond the Venetian laguna through Eastern Europe and as far afield as Ecuador and Thailand.

That provides the link to the truck crash, but it’s still a matter of finding the murderer, which is going to be a little tricky since the top level of the network are eminent Italians virtually untouchable by the police.

Brunetti, on the other hand, with Signorina Elettra on his side, can call in a favour from a judge, and has a teenage daughter who went to the same school as Trevisan’s daughter. All of them add something to the investigation, though when Chiara provides one of the key links towards the end, Brunetti ends up wishing she hadn’t.

This fourth title in the Commissario Brunetti series has its origins in a newspaper article Leon read during the Bosnian war and as the plot line unfolds Brunetti’s struggle against a corrupt system provides a fascinating read, particularly when you look at it in the light of the anti-austerity protests currently taking place across Europe.

Donna Leon "Death in a Strange Country"

Having suggested Donna Leon has managed to land a fully formed character in the first Commissario Brunetti novel, it should come as no surprise to learn there's no hint of continuity from La Fenice to a Strange Country. Where other writers are still finding their feet with the new character and trying out different possibilities, Death in a Strange Country starts the way most Brunetti stories start, and proceeds gradually, step by step from there.

That means, of course, that there's no need to actually read these stories in sequence, since the only long term key character yet to emerge is Signora Elettra and the only reason she hasn’t turned up yet is because she hasn’t been needed.

In other words you could summarise the plot line with a semi-formulaic Brunetti is going about his ordinary day to day business when he’s called to a crime scene, the investigation meanders along and there’s an eventual resolution of some, though not necessarily all, of the issues raised in the course of the investigation.

Expressed in those terms (and the same is more or less true of anything in the genre) there’s not really that much there, and the devil (or, in this case, the charm) is in the detail the author provides to put some flesh on the bare bones, and it’s here that the distinctions that account for differing tastes come in.

James Lee Burke would people the narrative with a liberal helping of well-realised minor characters, a couple of truly impressive psycho and sociopaths and unearth the odd skeleton in several interlocking closets along the way, with frequent reminders of their own mortality and past failings for  the key players. When you’re talking the detail, that, for mine, is the devil, but it will be played out across a prose landscape that’s immaculately realised in writing that goes close to shining.

Andrea Camilleri will have Montalbano running across the Sicilian landscape, interacting with the regular cast and manipulating things to thwart the Commissioner’s efforts to hamstring him, and the whole thing will proceed at a lively clip with a definite raffish charm.

Donna Leon, on the other hand, with Venice as the backdrop and Brunetti as the ordinary family man thrown in to investigate matters that have more to them than meets the eye, moves things through a narrative that has its twists and turns and while we’re often talking serious matters the interaction of weighty issues and a decent human being are the key ingredient in a very well realised series.

Death in a Strange Country starts with the body of a young man found floating in a Venetian canal.He’s been stabbed, and there’s nothing on the body to identify him, but there were some coins in his pocket, and a look at his teeth convinces the coroner the victim was American, which at least provides a starting point for the investigation.

Given that identity and the fact that his wallet is missing it seems reasonable to assume the killing is a drug-related mugging, though a bit of preliminary checking reveals that the area where the body was found is relatively drug free (the garbage man has never complained of finding syringes on the street in the morning). As far as Brunetti’s superior, Vice-Questore Patta, is concerned, there’s a danger to the city’s tourist trade, so Brunetti had better be smart about finding a suitable culprit. Not necessarily the culprit, a culprit.

To stop him from getting too involved with unnecessary detail Patta hands him the investigation into a burglary from a Grand Canal palazzo which has all the external appearances of an insurance job.

A check around the city’s tourist accommodation fails to deliver any missing Americans, so Brunetti checks with a nearby military base. It’s not the sort of situation where the Italian police can just go barging in, but when the military authorities check around they find, yes, there’s a serviceman who’s gone missing and send in his superior officer to identify the body.

Captain Peters (Doctor Peters if we’re not talking rank), the superior officer, as it turns out, is young, female, attractive and deeply distressed when she views the body, something that doesn’t quite tally with personal detachment and her status as a medical practitioner though, in her own words on the way to the cemetery island, it’s different when you know the person. The reaction, when the identification is made, runs a bit deeper than that.

From there we’re teetering on the brink of spoiler territory, but the victim, Sgt. Michael Foster, apart from his designated position as public health inspector at the American military hospital wears another couple of hats. Brunetti’s visit to the base gives the author a free shot at some of the absurdities of a little America on foreign soil (Burger King, frozen pizza, Baskin Robbins and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the land of gelato).

Brunetti’s visit to the base, where he checks out Foster’s apartment doesn’t reveal much apart from a couple of plastic bags containing about a kilogram of white powder concealed in a heater. Brunetti removes them, doesn’t say anything about them and carefully empties the contents into one of Venice’s canals on the way back. He’s after the fingerprints on the packets rather than the contents, and when he gets those checked there are two sets of prints, one from the victim, the second possibly female. Hmmm...

A return visit to the apartment reveals someone has checked the hiding place, and a couple of days later Doctor Peters’ death is reported in the Sunday paper, with an overdose as the cause of death and a strong suggestion of suicide.

Since Doctor Peters had told Brunetti she’d spent six years in medical school followed by four years in the Army, and was six months off getting out (I shouldn’t even say I want to go back to my life. I want to start one) it’s fairly obvious (to Brunetti, at least) that someone is going to a great deal of trouble to cover up the reasons for the first murder, is determined to provide a ready-made solution to the crime and isn’t too particular about collateral damage.

Put all that together, and you’ve got the ingredients for an intriguing mystery, and while most of the characters hit the pages fully formed in Death at La Fenice and are unchanged here, there’s an evolutionary step in Brunetti’s relationship with his aristocratic father-in-law. After twenty years of marriage, Brunetti’s still not comfortable in his father-in-law’s presence, but Count Falier definitely has his uses. When you need to find out gossip about a German opera conductor, for instance, a social gathering at the Palazzo Falieri provides an avenue to meet the sort of people who might know.

Here, once the pieces have fallen into place and the deaths of Sergeant Foster and Doctor Peters have been explained, while it’s obvious nothing can be done through official channels a word in the right ear is enough to have the issue dealt with, though it’s fairly obvious no one is entirely happy about it.

Still, there’s no doubting Brunetti’s father-in-law is an integral part of the whole plot resolution puzzle. With his contacts within, and knowledge of, the upper echelons of Italian society he can get Brunetti’s investigations into places that wouldn’t normally be accessible, and when Signora Elettra hits the ground running in the third title in the series everything’s in place, and since that’s the case, the changes in Brunetti’s relationship with the in-laws will, of course, be a narrative strand to watch as I work through the rest of the series in order.