Donna leon He has that gift of only the masters of the police genre. I'm referring to that ability to build plots and more plots about crimes that are apparently unsolvable and that, thanks to star characters like the good old Brunetti, end up becoming intelligible to the reader as if it were a fascinating magic trick.
A capacity of virtuous connoisseurs of the human psyche, from where they pose the most unsuspected twists and turns to achieve the most evil ends through crime ...
There must be a point of madness in writers like Donna, or simply a facility to delve into the depths of the internal forum, where our worst feelings forge their foundations between impregnable walls of consciousness. Right there where they develop the most evil machinations to find their justice.
More than thirty books already contemplate this essential voice of the police, as I say, for me the reincarnation of Agatha Christie,
3 Recommended Novels By Donna Leon
Give and it will be given to you
What role can or should loyalty play in the life of a police inspector? It is a question that Commissioner Brunetti must face and ultimately answer in this case when the distinguished Elisabetta Foscarini, a childhood acquaintance, asks him for a favor. Elisabetta's mother was always generous with her family, so Brunetti feels obliged to help her and starts a private investigation to try to find out who could be threatening her daughter's family.
However, so far there is little concrete evidence: why would they want to harm a veterinarian and an accountant who works for a charity? The commissario is about to let the matter drop, attributing it to exaggerated maternal concern, when an attack occurs and the case takes a very dark turn. Brunetti will be forced to call in his own favors to move forward with an investigation that will inevitably become official when he discovers the two faces of what seemed like a venerable institution.
In the 31st case of his career, Guido Brunetti faces, in a Venice almost unrecognizable due to the pandemic, the chiaroscuro of NGOs while the shadow of organized crime once again looms over the country, ready to take advantage of the health emergency.
Slaves of desire
Carnival, the carnal as a disturbing paradox of a sensory pleasure deformed to the point of aberration. The ability of human beings to shed their morals behind the mask of the moment to end up being capable of everything on that other side of the dark, that space of the wild ...
The appearance of two unconscious and seriously injured young girls at the entrance to the Civil Hospital in Venice puts Brunetti and Griffoni on the trail of two young Venetians who could have incurred in a crime of omission of the duty of relief. They are Marcelo Vio and Filiberto Duso, two friends since childhood, very different from each other: Duso works as a lawyer for his father's firm, while Vio stopped studying as a child and makes a living working for his uncle, who has a freight transport business and a small fleet of boats.
But what at first seemed like a prank by two young people who just wanted to have a good time, will uncover something much more serious: a connection with the illegal trafficking mafia in charge of bringing African immigrants to Venice. Brunetti and Griffoni will have to join forces with a new ally, Captain Ignazio Alaimo, the officer in charge of the Capitaneria di Porto, who has been tracking the smugglers for years.
Mortal remains
Like good wine (takes a great topic), Donna Leon is gaining ground over time. Nor is it a matter of always subjecting good old Brunneti to torture from case to case to exhaustion. From time to time it is convenient to close the folder of earrings and lie down in the sun to rest. In this is Brunetti, but…
Summary: There is no possible rest for a policeman. Whether in fiction or in reality, you can always find out about a new case that disturbs your days off. In the case of Mortal Remains, Donna Leon places us in a fiction that transcends reality.
By medical prescription, Commissioner Brunetti withdraws from all pending cases and retires to a bucolic place (the island of San Erasmo, in Venice) where peace is breathed, with the distant murmur of the bee farm that Davide Casati, the caretaker of the Brunetti family home, he maintains.
And this is where fiction catches up with reality (without ever surpassing it, only matching it, which can be even worse). The depletion of bees in the world, with its pollinating function, heralds serious damage to all humanity. Einstein already warned. The fact that there may be economic interests to kill these crucial insects seems perverse.
That is why for me Davide Casati is a personified metaphor. His death becomes an affront to the ecosystem. In this story, multinational companies interested in the extinction of bees are transformed into the toxic company suspected of the death under water of Davide Casati.
The quixotic idea of ​​the person fighting the multinational to uncover the murder case is extremely interesting. And good old Donna knows how to set the necessary rhythm.
The case of Davide becomes the case of the people against that economic interest that seeks to destabilize the ecosystem. Brunetti is loaded with the weight of this great case that serves to raise awareness of very real aspects. An entertaining and committed reading. Tension in the plot and hope in an ending that finds justice.
Other interesting books by Donna Leon ...
you will reap storms
In her apparent vision of a city suspended in time, between canals, kinky bridges and large houses with a touch between the melancholic and the decadent, Venice is in the hands of Donna Leon to offer us the most noir perspective ever imagined. Inexhaustible adventures of a Brunetti peering into a city whose general masquerade extends well beyond the carnival to hide, between covered faces, the worst that the human soul can harbor.
On a cold November night, Guido Brunetti receives a call from his colleague, the ispettore Vianello, alerting him that a hand has been seen in one of Venice's canals. He soon finds the body and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of this undocumented immigrant. Since there is no official record of the man's presence in Venice, he is forced to turn to much richer sources of information in the city: gossip and the memories of people who knew the victim. Curiously, he had been living in a small house in the grounds of a palazzo owned by a university professor, in which Brunetti discovers books that reveal the victim's interest in Buddhism, the revolutionary Tamil Tigers and the latest crop of Italian political terrorists. , active in the eighties.
As the investigation deepens, Brunetti, Vianello, Commissioner Griffoni and Signorina Elettra put together pieces of a puzzle that seem to have little in common, until Brunetti stumbles upon something that takes him back to his student days and makes him reflect on the lost ideals and mistakes of youth, about Italian politics and history, and about unexpected events that can sometimes lead to a revelation.
Bogus tests
This is a good example of what I mentioned before, the author's ability to achieve that magic of the impossible twist that ends up providing a fascinating coherence to the story. And if the reader is a participant in the turn even better.
Summary: This new adventure by Commissioner Brunetti begins with the brutal murder of an old woman hated by her neighbors. Suspicions hang over his Romanian maid, who disappeared the afternoon of the crime.
Harassed, the young woman dies during the police chase, taking with her a considerable amount of money and false documentation. Case closed, but not solved ...
A neighbor of the victim makes it clear that the employee could not commit the murder, but only Brunetti will believe her alibi. A discussion with Paola about the seven deadly sins will put you on the trail of a possible motive.
The Venetian bureaucracy, prejudices towards immigrants from the East and towards homosexuals, or the terror of AIDS are some of the themes that appear in False tests as Brunetti and, of course, the efficient and faithful Elettra, advance in the investigation .
The girl of his dreams
The death of a young person can be upsetting. For someone like Brunetti it is not always, too bad habit. But sometimes an empty gaze revisits him during his dreams, imploring justice and as if whispering to him when awakening the reality of what happened ...
Summary: Ariana, a gypsy girl of only ten years old, appears dead in the channel, in possession of a man's watch and a wedding ring. Lying on the flagstones of the pier, Ariana looks like a fairytale princess, a halo of golden hair frames her face, a little face that Brunetti begins to see in his dreams.
To investigate the case, Brunetti infiltrates the gypsy community, the Roma, in the official language of the Italian police, who live camped near the Dolo. But the Roma children sent to rob the wealthy Venetian houses do not officially exist, and to solve the case Brunetti has to struggle with institutional prejudice, a rigid bureaucracy and his own guilty conscience.
