Give Unto Others (A Commissario Brunetti Mystery)

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Give Unto Others (A Commissario Brunetti Mystery)

Give Unto Others (A Commissario Brunetti Mystery)

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Crime fiction for those willing to grapple with, rather than escape, the uncertainties of daily life. Wife Paola is still teaching at the university and kids Chiara and Raffi are still in school (after 30 years! When the crime-scene team surveys the burglarized veterinary clinic of Dottoressa del Balzo, its members appear to have a wide range of reactions. While the Brunetti books, with their abundance of local color and gastronomic treats, appeal to the fans of the traditional mystery, Leon has something darker and deeper in mind. Sadly this volume had very very little of the last two categories which I missed but even so, my annual Venetian visit was still well worth it.

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.

Revenge, that deformed child of justice, fed itself with blind desire incapable of seeing what was ahead, caring nothing about means or method and about what it destroyed in its wake. Maybe I’ll have to go back to the start and read through the series afresh – I need to find a way of bridging that gap. When Comissario Guido Brunetti is approached by an old neighbour he doesn’t know how he can help her when she details the vague possibility her son-in-law may be in trouble. 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. His inner monologue is often engaging, and his philosophical musings, for example about the similarities between pickpockets and those claiming pandemic handouts, are insightful.

But the deeper truth, when Brunetti uncovers it, admonishes him for forgetting to be a policeman when he most needed to. Along the way, I particularly enjoyed the chemistry between Brunetti – a born and bred Venetian – and his fellow Commissario, Claudia Griffoni, a Neapolitan by birth.Venice, in the pandemic’s tail end, and the Questura is not overrun with criminal cases, so Brunetti agrees to look into a private matter, off the books, for a former neighbour. As Brunetti considers how information travels around Venice, he realizes that “long before computer chips could collect someone’s personal data, their neighbors did” (p. I wonder if Ms Leon would ever think of spin offs as her secondary characters like Elettra, Vianello, Griffoni and his in laws are more interesting than he is now. Six chapters and 50 pages and the first situation is not set up what with everyone pausing to look out the window with their fingers to their throats!

the author wasted good characters (as shown in previous novels) as bumbling, not-sure-what-to-do-next police officers. Working out that things are not as they seem leads Brunetti to several interesting characters and families. It’s usual in Leon’s latest books to have different kinds of crime, but I always find blood crime much more entertaining, and this time around there was a not a single dead body in sight. If this makes the books sound somewhat muddled or confused then I can only assure you that they don’t read this way.I cannot take seriously any idea that fortune of birth alone somehow conveys a greater complement of life’ s positive qualities than those found in less wealthy/socially prominent individuals. No author has delved into Venetian society quite like Leon, whose insider’s view shows how crime seeps throughout the city, touching all strata of society. Sadly, Paola hardly appears and says very little and we don't even see Brunetti's family, usually a source of much warmth and light-heartedness. 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.

They move onto a South American charity that Fenzo had helped Elisabetta's husband set up, the Belize nel Cuore, providing a hospital and medical services to the poor, a charity that was founded with a retired, ex-naval Vice-Admiral suffering from dementia. I gave up trying to work out what was going to happen very early in the book - I was content just to be in the story - but the ending still took me completely by surprise. She no longer lives in Venice (she still spends about a week a month there) but I cannot help but think of her as European if not Italian.Donna Leon's latest in the Commissario Guido Brunnetti series is an intelligent, slow burn, meandering unofficial investigation led by Brunnetti, in which he ropes in fellow Questura colleagues, Claudia Griffoni, Lorenzo Vianello and the woman from whom very little can be hidden, secretary Signorina Elletra Zorza. So overall this felt rather slight to me even though the 'crime' speaks volumes - and I found the plotting rather holey, not least the perpetrator and their actions. Brunetti is approached by a woman who knew him and his family long ago, asking his “advice”; she is worried about her daughter because of the behaviour of the daughter’s husband.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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