Brunetti is approached for a favor by Elisabetta Foscarini, a woman he knows casually, but her mother was good to Brunetti's mother, so he feels obliged to at least look into the matter privately, and not as official police business. For now, my re-visits are through Donna Leon’s annual slice of thought provoking fiction: her brilliantly observed characters; her highly tuned eye spotting things most casual observers would walk straight past; her intelligent insight into problems both modern and timeless. It is clear that this is a warning against Brunetti looking into the situation that was brought to his attention.

There is often the vague sense of wrong doing, not necessarily of a life threatening nature but rather of a threat to society. Leon] has never become perfunctory, never failed to give us vivid portraits of people and of Venice, never lost her fine, disillusioned indignation. The appeal of Guido Brunetti, the hero of Donna Leon’s long-running Venetian crime series, comes not from his shrewdness, though he is plenty shrewd, nor from his quick wit. En esta novela aparece el hermano médico de Bunetti con un papel corto pero fundamental, recuperando la memoria de la familia. Obviously, good detectives spend a lot of time interviewing people so necessarily there's a lot of dialog.

You are well read in philosophy and the classics, are devoted to your beautiful wife, Paola--the daughter of a count and a professor of English literature with an emphasis on Henry James--and your teenaged children, Raffi and Chiara. Brunetti and the rest of Donna Leon’s characters have accompanied me for more than half my life, so reading her new novel has become a kind of yearly ritual to meet back some old friends and catch up with their lives.

That sense of characterisation and connection is an important part of the novel and what drives this reader to seek out each new instalment. When reading a Brunetti novel, you expect to get more than just the story with which to immerse yourself. Leon’s long-running series, he’s had to deal with all sorts of ambitious and untrustworthy types, chief of which is the “ever-helpful” Lt. The Mafias have liquidity problems: how on earth are they going to launder all the money which is coming their way?

You'll meet old friends but still connect with all the characters even if you've not met them before. and there is a certain Netflix conversation with a colleague that cleverly disguises the real subject of their discussion from unwanted listeners. The crime itself – if you can actually identify one – is often inconsequential to my enjoyment of these books, what I most enjoy is the verbal jousting that takes place between the various players and the frequent tangential musings on art, food, literature and history, or simply on the overt bureaucracy that is an inescapable component of life in this country. However, when his friend’s daughter’s place of work is vandalized, Brunetti asks his own favors—that his colleagues Claudia Griffoni, Lorenzo Vianello, and Signorina Elettra Zorzi assist his private investigation, which soon enough turns official as they uncover the dark and Janus-faced nature of a venerable Italian institution. Elisabetta Foscarini is concerned for her daughter Flora when her son-in-law, an accountant, begins acting out of character and mentions possible harm to people who know what is happening.