Donna Leon "By Its Cover"

They say you can't, but with Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti series that landed on its feet almost fully formed running to twenty-three titles anyone who's been along for most of the ride can take a glance at the book and have a pretty fair idea of what they'll be getting.

The elements will, of course, vary from title to title. The amount of time Brunetti gets to spend at home and when he manages to get there will affect how much of his family the reader sees in each successive title. The actual case he's dealing with may or may not present opportunities for the wonderful and  highly efficient Signorina Elettra to do her computer-based thing.

Brunetti's boss, the entirely loathsome Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, will appear in his office just before lunch and depart not that long afterwards, and how far his nose sticks into Brunetti's case will depend on the case's effect on the issues that matter to him.

Apart from Signorina Elettra most of the cast have been in place since the  first title in a series that landed on its feet almost fully formed from the start of Death at La Fenice. You know, more or less, what you're going to get. It's just a question of detail and delivering an outcome.

This time around it's an afternoon phone call from the director of Biblioteca Merula, a prestigious library with an extensive holding of rare books. A number of titles have had pages cut out, maps and  illustrations rather than pages of text, and others have gone missing.

As far as library director Dottoressa Patrizia Fabbiani is concerned there's an obvious suspect. American academic Joseph Nickerson, from the University of Kansas, has been using the library for research into medieval Mediterranean maritime trade but has suddenly vanished after daily visits over a solid three week period. Books he has requested are gone, others are damaged. There's your man. Q.E.D.

He's definitely a suspect, particularly after his passport turns out to be a fake and a check with the University of Kansas reveals they have no one by that name on the payroll.

But he's not the only regular visitor who passes under the gaze of library guard Piero Sartor.
Another regular reader is the former priest the library staff has nicknamed Tertullian since his regular reading matter is mainly drawn from the works of this prolific early Christian polemicist against heresy. According to the Wikipedia Tertullian has been called the father of Latin Christianity and the founder of Western theology.

According to Brunetti, on the other hand, he's dry as dust and the fact that anyone, ex-priest or not, would spend three years reading his voluminous output piques his interest. The latter day Tertullian also seems to have vanished and when he is found brutally murdered, Brunetti finds himself investigating something more serious than theft.

The Patta angle this time around kicks in when he learns that several of the vandalised or missing volumes were donated to the library by Contessa Elisabetta Morosini-Albani, the wealthy widow  whose late husband was the head of a long-established Venetian family. As a total philistine, the theft and vandalism barely register on Patta's radar. The possibility that the Contessa's nose might be put out of joint is entirely another matter and Brunetti is cleared to investigate a matter that might otherwise have been pushed to one side and pinned on the obvious suspect.

Interestingly, when Brunetti interviews the Contessa his wife's aristocratic connections come into play as Brunetti quietly goes about piecing the ins and outs of the trade in purloined vintage editions together.

By Its Cover seems to have been prompted by a wave of theft and vandalism in libraries, museums and churches, and particularly by the systematic looting of thousands of rare books from Girolamini Library in Naples unearthed in 2012. That was the work of the library's director, and here, as Brunetti patiently peels away the layers of things that aren't quite what they seem Leon gets the chance to vent through her characters.

Theft and vandalism in the world of rare books aren't the only things to attract her wrath. There's a particularly well crafted incident involving a massive cruise liner Brunetti and his offsider encounter in the course of their perambulations (or the maritime equivalent thereof) and the presence of crowds of tourists as spring starts to kick in are a perennial target as well.

When you're looking at a series that has been running this long you're always likely to suspect a tendency to phone it in, and you may well think that's operating here. There's not much that could be described as a new development, and not much room for Signorina Elettra to do her thing, but that's largely a function of the subject under investigation. You can use the internet to check things like prices of rare books, but that's about as far as it goes.

But if the author is delivering the latest episode telephonically I'd suggest there'll be a tendency on the part of the reader to put things aside. By Its Cover's blend of intrigue, theft, blackmail and murder kept me turning the pages until I got to the end and left me looking for more after a characteristically abrupt end.

The Golden Egg ended with Brunetti setting out for a brooding walk along a wind and rain swept Lido, and By Its Cover comes to a full stop because, really, once Brunetti has pulled out his phone and dialled the number of the Questura and requested the warrant there really isn't anything more that needs to be said.

Donna Leon "The Golden Egg"

I read Wasting no more words on her Brunetti left the hospital to go and get the boat to the Lido to go for a walk on the beach, turned the page and came to the regulation copyright notice one finds at the ends of certain brands of e-book. “Hang on,” I thought, “there’s something missing here.”

A reread of the final couple of pages, however, revealed Donna Leon had nothing more to say on Commissario Brunetti’s investigation into the death of Davide Cavanella, a deaf and mentally disabled man who worked in Brunetti’s neighbourhood dry cleaner because, basically, there was nothing more to say. Another author might have been tempted to moralise or comment, but with the mystery explained the rather matter of fact Brunetti is off for a walk on the beach.

Not that his stroll is likely to be particularly enjoyable. The story starts with the first leaves of autumn beginning to fall, and the investigation doesn’t take that long, but an autumnal, a cold, wet Venice, with the architecture shrouded in grey sheeting mizzle is probably the right setting for Brunetti to brood over the depressing details of what he’d found.

A lesser author would take the reader out to the Lido, deliver the protagonist’s melancholy meditations and belabour the moralisations. Readers who’ve been aboard for a while, however, will have a fair idea of the trend Brunetti’s thoughts would have taken and a definite opinion about what he’d have gone on to do afterwards.

That, of course, is probably either what he’d done once he’d taken the initial steps that needed to be taken after the latest self-serving directive from Vice Questore Patta (asked Vianello if he’d like to come for a coffee) or, if the time was right, head home for lunch or dinner with his wife and family, drink a little wine and possibly read a little Tacitus.

Patta’s request involves Brunetti looking into a seemingly minor violation of the public vending regulations committed by the business partner of the mayor’s future daughter-in-law. It’s an election year, Patta’s out to avoid any hint of a scandal and Brunetti, while he has no desire to help Patta consolidate his political connections, has no choice but to follow the directive, which is, basically, to find out if the vigili involved are trustworthy.

The vigili urbani, for those who mightn’t be quite up with the terminology, are the unarmed officers whose job it was to see that city ordinances were obeyed. In this instance they seem to be ignoring the tables set up outside a shop in Campo San Barnaba that sells masks, next to the one with the expensive cheese (Brunetti lives nearby and knows the area fairly well) and it’s possible the proprietors of the mask shop don’t have all the permits to use that space. A petty matter, but where Patta’s concerned, par for the course.

Brunetti delivers the task of making a discreet inquiry to a junior officer before heading off with his right hand man for a coffee, learning, along the way that Vianello’s concerned about the ecological implications of his wife’s proposed holiday in the Seychelles. A farm stay hotel in Umbria’s more his style.

Brunetti passes through Patta’s antechamber to compare notes with an increasingly subversive Signorina Elettra (Why do we tolerate this ... and not go after them with clubs?) on the way back, and arrives in his office to find the phone ringing. It’s his wife, Paola, informing him of the death of the boy who doesn’t talk at the dry cleaner’s.

Although he was actually aged over forty, a deaf mute with the intellectual age of a child, as far as the neighbourhood was concerned he was the boy who helped out at the dry cleaner’s, and nobody knew his name or anything much about him. He seems to have died as the result of an accidental overdose of his mother's sleeping pills, having presumably swallowed a handful because they looked like candy. Paola can’t help being distraught at the thought that he lived a joyless life and died without anyone noticing him, helping him or understanding his situation.

But when Brunetti starts making a few inquiries about Davide Cavanella a number of intriguing issues raise their heads, centred around the question of how a man in his forties could have passed through several decades without leaving anything in the way of a paper trail. There’s no birth or baptismal certificate, no passport, no driver’s license, no credit cards and he never seems to have visited a doctor or been enrolled in the school system. In short, there’s nothing that might serve to verify that he actually existed.

That’s strange, because given the obvious disability issues, both he and his mother would have been entitled to financial support from government programs designed to help the disabled, and in a country where unethical claims for state assistance are rife, he’s a disabled person for whom no claims were ever lodged.

According to Ana Cavanella, who doesn’t want to discuss the death at all, her son’s papers were stolen years ago, and it’s obvious there’s much more to the story than she is letting on. There’s an extra complication since she lives in a working-class neighbourhood where the state is the enemy, and when the police come around asking questions the neighbours become as deaf and mute as the subject of the inquiries.

As the clues start to stack up, Brunetti comes to believe the death may not have been an accident and suspects the wealthy Lembo family, aristocratic copper magnates who employed Ana Cavanella for many years and Brunetti gradually draws out the information he needs to form the full picture of Davide Cavanella’s existence.

Along the way, of course, he has this other issue with Patta’s request, and there’s also a move afoot to remove Signorina Elettra from her current office and install Patta’s loathsome offsider Lieutenant Scarpa as his official receptionist. That won’t do at all, and Brunetti manages to find a means to prevent it.

But the main issue is the Cavanella case, and while Brunetti might have embarked on the inquiry expecting to find nothing suspicious, what he stumbles across instead is chilling, calculating and deeply disturbing.

Disturbing enough to have Brunetti, once he’s sorted things out in his own mind (there’s nothing much he can do in any official sense) setting out for a brooding walk along a wind and rain swept Lido.

The Golden Egg might seem to be a relatively low-key affair for much of the story, but there’s a sting in the tail and along the way the reader comes across all the elements we’ve come to expect in a Donna Leon story. Brunetti’s family and colleagues go about their business, providing the opportunity for evocative references to Venetian history and architecture, moody ruminations on Italian politics and society, and the regulation descriptions of the city’s food, weather and social life.

It’s Number Twenty-two in the series, and shows an author who doesn’t seem to be running out of steam. Remarkably, given the longevity of the series, for my money it’s getting better.

Donna Leon "Beastly Things"

It has taken twenty-one volumes to do it, but Commissario Brunetti’s son Raffi has (finally) finished school and headed off to University. Apart from that development practically nothing (apart from the emergence of Elettra Zorzi back in Dressed for Death, the third volume in the series) has changed as far as the major characters are concerned since the first episode. It’s fairly obvious that Donna Leon hit on a winning formula way back in Death at La Fenice and has been able to spin the same elements out every year since. It’s a remarkable achievement.

Of course, it helps to have the right setting. Given the endemic corruption in the Italian political system and the wealth of social, political and environmental issues and throw in a healthy dose of ambition, and a heaping helping of greed and you’ve got plenty to work with. Greed drives the wrongdoers, and Brunetti has to tackle cases with thorny implications while steering around Vice-Questore Patta’s determination to look after the well-connected and maintain Venice’s reputation as a Mecca for cashed-up tourists. Brunetti, of course loathes them, detests him, can almost read him like a book and has worked out how to manage him.

This time around the investigation is prompted by the discovery of a body in a canal, hardly an unusual starter either, and the corpse isn’t carrying a wallet or anything else that might help to identify him. No one has been reported missing, there no hotel guests unaccounted for, and the face has been damaged while in the water. He is, however, missing a shoe and the one he’s was wearing is rather distinctive. Every little bit helps.

A bigger help is a rare, disfiguring disease. Madelung's disease (Benign symmetric lipomatosis) is a condition that results in extensive fat deposits around the head, neck, and shoulders, often related to alcohol abuse, though there’s no sign of it in this case.Given that condition there’s something familiar about the man, and Brunetti realises he’s seen the victim before, at a farmers' protest that was filmed by news camera crews and a look at the video footage delivers an image that Brunetti can use in the investigation.

When Brunetti and Vianello set out to canvass the shoe stores they end up in Mestre on the mainland, and learn the victim was a kind man who had a way with animals, and he’s eventually identified as Dottor Andrea Nava, a popular veterinarian whose funeral, described in a moving epilogue, attracts a large congregation that includes nearly as many pets as it does people. epilogue Leon describes the funeral service for an upright, yet all too human, veterinarian where there are as many pets as people in the congregation.

Which leaves the question of why someone would want to stab him in the back three times and dump the body in a canal. He might be estranged from his wife but she faints when Brunetti and Vianello, break the news to her. Guilt or grief? His assistant at his veterinary practice, can shed no light on his death although she reveals he was working moonlighting as a part-time meat inspector at a local abattoir. That’s the environment that resulted in the dalliance with Director Alessandro Papetti’s personal assistant Giulia Borelli, though that doesn’t seem to provide a motive for murder.

A tour of the slaughterhouse brings Brunetti and Vianello up against the realities of the meat industry that made vegetarians of his colleague Vianello and his daughter Chiara.
That particular sequence is a gruesome read though the experience isn’t enough to turn Brunetti into a vegetarian. It does, however, shape dinner conversations in the Brunetti household and interactions with Vianello and Signorina Elettra at the Questura. If you’re not inclined towards the gory details you won’t miss anything by skipping over that section.

Outside the ethical issues associated with slaughterhouses there are the usual elements running alongside the main investigation. Signorina Elettra, as usual, manages to hack into the computer system of whatever Italian institution or government department and Vianello is starting to pick up the same skills but has a way to go to catch the Signorina.
Brunetti’s conscience isn’t entirely happy about this, but he’s not going to forego the useful info, is he?

The investigation meanders along clearly and logically, with everything falling neatly into place in the end and discussions about marital fidelity and the risks therein (Vianello reckons he’d be shot, and Brunetti would either be pushed off the balcony or a rapid transferred to a Mafia infested town in the South), Italian losses in the First World War (Raffi’s studying modern history at the University) and the relative strengths of various players’ social connections.

There’s nothing there that’s new, and Beastly Things is of a piece with everything that has gone before. Number Twenty-two, The Golden Egg, is due in April. The preorder is already in.

Donna Leon "Acqua Alta"

A North Queensland wet season with the regular river rises and frequent flooding is probably a good time to read something set in the middle of the Venetian acqua alta (high water). One of Leon’s strengths is the way Venice is portrayed through Venetian eyes, and the portrait isn’t always painted at the most attractive time of the year.

Acqua alta refers to exceptional winter tide peaks in the Venetian Lagoon and the northern Adriatic. There’s partial flooding in Venice as the tides are reinforced by seasonal winds, the southerly sirocco and the north-easterly bora, which blows across the Venetian lagoon. The two combine to hamper the usual outflow resulting from winter rains, which is also affected by the long rectangular shape of the Adriatic (there’s an oscillating water motion, the seiche, that supplements the regular tidal cycle to produce more extreme tidal events than you’d find in the rest of the Mediterranean basin), the shape of the Venetian lagoon, soil subsidence in Venice and the coastal areas around the Lagoon and rising sea levels.

When all these factors coincide they prevent one high tide from ebbing, which means the next high comes over the top of it in a sort of self-perpetuating cycle and it’s time to sound the sirens and alert the citizens of an intense event (80 to 109 cm above regular sea level, affecting up to 14% of the city), a very intense episode (110 to 139 cm, up to 54%) or exceptional high waters (above 140 cm). If it gets to two metres the whole city will go under.

The flooding isn’t uniform due to differing heights above sea level throughout the city, distances from channel and canals, the height of the footpaths (fondamenta), and the layout of the sewerage and drainage network. In such circumstances no sensible person will leave home without their gumboots and the routes they take to and from work, shopping and whatever leisure activities they’re inclined to indulge in aren’t necessarily the shortest line connecting two locations. Police work and civil rescues are affected by the waters, and the ways in which the locals deal with the day to day issues adds colour to the series, and fleshes out a rather straightforward plot line.

As far as that plot line is concerned, Acqua Alta reintroduces us to American art historian and archaeologist Brett Lynch and her lover, operatic diva Flavia Petrelli from Death at La Fenice, the first book in the series. Brett, who organised an exhibition of Chinese pottery, is savagely beaten by two well-dressed men, who warn her not to keep an appointment with Dottor Semenzato, director of the museum where the exhibition was displayed.

Brunetti is one of the few who are appalled by the attack, since he knows Brett and Flavia from the earlier episode, and he’s determined to track down the culprit. Vice-Questore Patta isn’t that concerned by an assault on a foreigner who happens to be a lesbian, but when museum director Semenzato is murdered there’s a bit more urgency in the investigation (as far as he’s concerned, anyway).

There’s more than likely some connection between the two cases, and even if it turns out there isn’t, that assumption is the obvious place to start. As Brunetti continues the investigation it becomes clear that the exhibition of Chinese antiquities is a key piece in the jigsaw puzzle.  It seems Semenzato had been peddling artworks, including some lifted from the Chinese exhibition and replaced with close replications, and his customers include some influential people, including a Sicilian who simultaneously is and isn’t the stereotypical Mafia boss.

By the fifth title in a series that runs to more than twenty and counting, the themes that underlie a Brunetti mystery are firmly in place and the long term reader knows, more or less, what the story’s going to be about. In those circumstances the local colour, the acqua alta, the intricacies of the heating system in the Questura and the interactions between and among the regular characters are what keeps the reader coming back for more, assuming the Brunetti stories are the kind of thing that floats your boat.

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.

Donna Leon "Death at La Fenice"

The fact that I’ve enjoyed whatever Donna Leon title I’ve picked up probably means she was a prime contender for reread the series from the start status, but if I hadn’t chanced upon Death at La Fenice in the el cheapo bins at Townsville’s Target that prospect would probably be something for the distant future.

As it turns out, now that I’ve got, and have read, the first title, there have been orders for the next couple (currently substantially discounted to the point where there’s not that much difference between tracking them down at Fishpond and scouring the el cheapo bins for the little devils.

So, One down, Two and Three ordered, a couple more on the shelves, two already reviewed on the website, what’s the G.O. here?

Well, for a start, it has been a long time since I found a first title in a seres that’s as fully formed as Death at La Fenice. Usually you start reading a series and things gradually fall in place as the author comes to terms with the key characters and the setting, but here, most of the elements that run through the series are firmly in place.

Admittedly, some of the characters who become key players in later titles have yet to make an appearance, the key one being Signora Elettra, computer wizard and secretary of Commissario Brunetti’s boss, who wouldn’t have been able to work her magic when Death was written because 1992 (the year the book was published) was comfortably before the development of the World Wide Web she trawls so efficiently.

But, effectively, from the get go we’ve got Guido Brunetti, devoted family man whose in-laws come from one of Venice’s foremost aristocratic families. He’s not exactly thrilled about this. Despite the fact he’s been married for seventeen years he isn’t sure of how to address the father-in-law and isn’t comfortable in their presence.

His wife and children are, from the start, much the way they continue to be through twenty years and twenty-one titles.

Paola Brunetti, University lecturer in English literature, has most of the mannerisms that continue through the series in place from the start, though her reputation in the kitchen is still to come to the fore and the two teenage kids age a little over the series, but it’s not as if Brunetti’s about to become a grandfather any time soon.

Another key piece who falls into place almost fully formed is Brunetti’s superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppi Patta, the vain and almost insufferably pretentious man who’s not very bright. While he’ll suck up to the rich and influential he doesn’t seem to have bothered to dig around enough to learn Brunetti’s father-in-law has two doges on his mother’s side of the family or maybe he’s too busy associating himself with politicians and the like to be admitted to the patrician circles where the really influential Venetians are found.

In any case, news that world famous conductor Helmut Wellauer has been found dead at the end of the intermission between Acts Two and Three of Verdi’s La Traviata in La Fenice Opera House is certain to be greeted with alarm among Patta’s superiors so he’ll inevitably be throwing his weight around in the quest for a quick solution to a death that casts the city in a very bad light, isn’t he?

Brunetti, on the other hand, goes about his business systematically, using clever mental stratagems to avoid excessive angst prompted by Patta’s posturing and tackling the suspects diplomatically as he comes to realise that the key to the mystery lies somewhere in Wellauer’s personality and quite possibly in the long distant past.

From the moment the body is discovered there’s no doubt about how he died. There’s a smell of bitter almonds in the dressing room, to the extent that the doctor who’s called to the scene and Brunetti both know there was cyanide in the maestro’s coffee even though they’ve only read about that sort of thing in detective stories.

Backstage at the opera house isn’t what you might call the most security-conscious of environments (it’s supposed to be, but from remarks made by musicians, singers and stage hands during the investigation you know it isn’t) and there are a number of people nearby who could have delivered the deadly dose of caffeinated cyanide.

For a start, Wellauer was a noted homophobe, director Franco Santore is gay, and Wellauer has refused to honour an agreement to cast Santore's protege is a role that would possibly make his name.

There’s also the question of leading soprano Flavia Petrelli, whose lesbian liaison with independently wealthy American archeologist, Brett Lynch, Wellauer was reputedly threatening to expose, an act that would see the singer’s Spanish ex-husband gain custody of their two children.

There’s a much younger, suddenly wealthy widow, who would naturally attract suspicion, and allegations of pro-Nazi sympathies in Wellauer’s past, which may have something to do with things but it’s not a case where forensic evidence is going to throw any light on the matter.

The only fingerprints on Wellauer’s coffee cup are the maestro’s own, and given the number people who would have used the dressing room there’s not going to be much joy there so, in the end, the only way through to a solution is to piece things together from gossip, chance remarks and a bit of historical research.

The search for scuttlebutt takes Brunetti from the lofty heights of a party at Count and Countess Falier’s (his in-laws) palazzo through assorted dressing rooms, back stage areas, hotel rooms and apartments to the wretched circumstances of a destitute soprano living on the island of Guidecca, and along the way Brunetti uncovers lurid tales from Wellauer’s past and unearths fascinating stories about many of the suspects.

Suspicions start to become obvious from fairly early on in the piece. Wellauer’s second wife committed suicide when their daughter was twelve, and the current wife’s early teenage daughter from a previous marriage is away at boarding school, which strikes Brunetti as extremely suspicious when he notes the total absence of anything you’d associate with a teenage girl in the conductor’s Venice apartment.

After all, even if she was only on the premises intermittently, Brunetti is all too aware of the teenage female’s ability to leave things behind. He’s got one at home, hasn’t he?

While the reader is pretty sure which way things are heading, there’s a neat twist at the end that leaves Brunetti with a difficult moral issue a the end. While he knows what happened it’s not the sort of case where you’d want to be revealing too much of what went on behind the scenes of the victim’s life.

And that, I think, is what makes this first title in an extensive series so remarkable. Donna Leon has managed to deliver what was originally a one-off joke prompted by a friend’s suggestion that she try writing a crime novel and put in place elements that are good enough to keep her, and the reader, going through twenty titles without adding too much to the original mix.

Of course, when you’ve got a setting like Venice, an eye for detail, and an intimate knowledge of sensibilities in La Serenissima, you’ve probably got a walk up start, but Brunetti’s an engaging character, the interactions with his family down to the surreptitious support for an anti-capitalist son who gloats over winning at Monopoly work, and his dealings with his loathsome boss reflect a degree of pragmatism in a character who’d be, one suspects, an idealist by inclination.

Donna Leon "Friends In High Places"

Having read Tobias Jones' The Dark Heart of Italy and reached the conclusion that writers of Italian crime fiction (or, more accurately, crime fiction set in Italy) are probably understating things on the grounds that non-Italian readers wouldn't believe the reality I found the starting scenes in Donna Leon's Friends In High Places quite believable.

We've got our own heritage bureaucracy, of course, and some of their actions get people in these parts quite het up, but the local authorities wouldn't be too likely to barge into your home suggesting that it might need to demolished because they don't have any record that suggests it exists.

From my readings of Italian crime fiction, on the other hand, I find that situation quite plausible.

In any case, that's the situation Commissario Guido Brunetti finds himself in when a bureaucrat from the Ufficio Catasto calls on him at home one Saturday morning. They're in the process of consolidating the official records and sorting out anomalies and they can't find anything on the official record from the time the top floor apartment was built.

In the process of remonstrating about the obvious absurdity of the situation Brunetti notes that Franco Rossi apparently suffers from an extreme form of vertigo, which makes him suspicious when Rossi is found at the foot of the scaffolding at the front of a property being redeveloped. There's a bit of stuffing around at the hospital, and Rossi has ended up dead. When he arrived at the emergency ward with head injuries and two broken arms the doctor decided to send him to Orthopaedics to have the fractures treated before he went into shock. They were supposed to forward him to Neurology, didn't, the patient dies and Brunetti reads about it in the paper and decides to check things out.

It certainly looks like it's either an accident or suicide, but people with a severe dislike of heights don't willingly go climbing on scaffolding, do they?

Equally significant is the fact that Rossi had been in touch with Brunetti regarding something that looks suspiciously like corruption in his workplace.

As far as the reaction to the threatened demolition of their apartment goes, Brunetti and his wife agree on the approach that needs to be taken, but disagree on who to use to get it done. As far as Paola is concerned her father, a Venetian nobleman with connections right at the top of the pecking order is the obvious choice while Guido reckons they'll be able to call in favours from someone among their friends rather than relying on the father-in-law.

Calling in favours, or expecting them to be done for you is apparently common practice in Venetian circles and Brunetti is required to do a spot of fixing when Vice-Questore Patta’s son is arrested for selling drugs. There's also a disturbing death through an overdose that needs to be investigated but looking into that too closely might have implications for the boss's son.

Along the way Brunetti also becomes aware of the activities of a couple of loan sharks and the whole bundle of strands continually returns to what's emerging as the central theme of Italian crime fiction - cronyism and corruption at the highest levels of government and society, the ways it trickles down through society and what ethical people with some degree of moral integrity can do about it.

In the end, however, there's not a great deal Brunetti can do. Everyone involved (or at least everyone who isn't occupying the very bottom rungs of the pecking order, who don't have too many friends at all) have Friends In High Places and even after he's found Rossi's killer and established the motive behind the killing there's not a great deal he can actually do about it.

He manages, predictably, to do something in his own small way, but it's hardly the sort of consequence the perpetrators deserve and Brunetti's reaction to the personal, moral and professional challenges he encounters that makes the series such a reliable source of reading pleasure.

Donna Leon "Drawing Conclusions"

I spent much of the morning walk the day after I finished Drawing Conclusions musing on my reading habits.

Actually, that's not quite right. I started off trying to figure a lead-in to a review of this latest title from Donna Leon, and those musings lead fairly directly towards a consideration of why I like what I like and why this was another highly enjoyable read.

Looking at these matters, it's fairly obvious that if I'm going to add an author or a series to the list of things to chase down it'll be because I like the characters and the setting rather than intricacies of plot line, action and suspense, which I tend to take for granted.

Donna Leon's Commisario Brunetti works as a character, and given the Venetian setting and the fact that Italians tend to eat and drink well the series is a fairly obvious candidate for the Little House of Concrete Bookshelves. It has the additional advantage of not necessarily being a series that needs to be read in order, which means I can grab the missing titles and read (or re-read) them as I find them.

There's also the undeniable fact that the subset of crime fiction usually labelled police procedural has a couple of fairly obvious attractions for the aspiring author. Any police station and its surrounding support and ancilliary services offers an almost ideal environment in which to create those intricate plot lines we've come to love.

After all, the hierarchy of any police force is going to feature any number of prickly characters, ambitious individuals and obnoxious prigs, and your main character's interaction with them is always going to give you something to work with.

At the start of Drawing Conclusions, Brunetti is undergoing the ordeal of a dinner  with Vice Questore Patta and Lieutenant Scarpa when an incoming call on his mobile gives him the excuse to get away from Scarpa's unfavourable assessment of the oenological practices of the Veneto region. It's one of those occasions that you'd prefer to avoid at all costs, but there are things that can't be evaded, and Brunetti has been known to use calls from his wife as a pretext for escaping such events.

It's not, however, Paola on the other end of the notional line. The body of Costanza Altavilla, a retired female teacher has been found by her upstairs neighbour, who has just returned from a disappointing holiday in Sicily and went looking for her mail, which the neighbour had been looking after.

In a situation where any excuse will do, Brunetti heads off to check what has all the appearances of death due to heart attack, though there are signs that could be consistent with some degree of violence - an obvious wound on the head and what could well be bruising near the collarbone — or could stem from falling onto the nearby radiator.

With the coroner's verdict favouring the heart attack theory, you'd expect that would be it, but there are things that intrigue Brunetti enough to poke around a bit further on the grounds that something may have created conditions that led to her heart attack.

Meetings with the woman’s son, called to identify the body, the upstairs neighbour, and the nun in charge of the nursing home where she worked as a volunteer leave Brunetti's suspicions undiminished. The son seems distracted by something, the neighbour witnessed something suspicious, and the nun, initially reluctant to reveal anything eventually describes the deceased’s terrible honesty.

There's still, of course, nothing to base a formal investigation around, but Brunetti continues digging away, aided by his offsider Vianello and Signorina Elettra, whose ability to infiltrate supposedly secure websites and similar sources of information proves, as usual, invaluable while simultaneously raising various ethical and moral issues.

The first aspect to be clarified involves the discovery of changes of clothes in various sizes in the deceased's apartment and discussions with the Signorina Elettra suggest Altavilla was helping abused women escape their abusers.

Well, there's a motive, for a start, and while the disappearance of her most recent guest seems to offer an explanation, but closer examination reveals a reality that differs from what appears on the surface.

With that avenue of investigation seemingly closed, Brunetti turns his attention to the nursing home, where Signora Altavilla volunteered, in search of an explanation for the heart attack. She was, he learns, someone willing to listen to stories told by people who have little left but their own memories, and in such circumstances she became the sort of confessor who hears things people would keep concealed from members of their own families.

That proves to be the secret here, though in the end it's not the sort of case where Brunetti's likely to press charges.

These things play out against the familiar Venetian backdrop, with Leon drawing on whichever of the familiar elements fit into the developing narrative. There's only marginal room for Brunetti's aristocratic in-laws, though the family connection turns out to be a key factor in solving the puzzle.

Brunetti misses his lunch on occasion, something the average reader wouldn't be doing if the dishes Paola prepares were visiting a kitchen near you, and the mealtime interactions with the family provide a stark contrast to the lunchtime scenes at the nursing home.

Against that backdrop there's plenty to muse on as far as the state of Italian society is concerned.

Signorina Elettra's electronic snooping isn't exactly ethical, but one suspects that if she wasn't doing it cases wouldn't end up being solved. Buying  flowers for the office and getting the Questra to pay by substituting a receipt for printer cartridges would be sailing pretty close to the anti-corruption wind in other jurisdictions but here, one suspects, if the substitution didn't occur the flowers wouldn't end up in the office.

There's nothing startlingly new in the twentieth tome in the series, but there's a niche-market familiarity that ensures that Leon fans will continue to track down successive Brunetti stories as they appear in the marketplace.