Death in a Strange Country

I first encountered Donna Leon when I picked up one of her books in the lending library of the resort on Crete. She has written over 20 mysteries featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Police, this being about the the 2nd in the series. A native of New Jersey, Ms. Leon has lived in Venice for 30 years and so has captured the flavor--the corrupt stink and the aching beauty--very well. This town of 60,000 attracts over 150,000 tourists a day, creating two incompatible worlds in a small area.  There is a also, in Leon's characters, a dichotomy between a sense of optimism and a sense of cynicism about what goes on in their country, those who choose to believe nothing bad is going on and those who are not the least bit surprised to find out, for example, that the government is in bed with big business and taking huge kickbacks to allow dumping of toxic waste in the countryside. When an American public health official from the military base in Vicenza turns up dead in a canal one morning, the higher ups want nothing more than to attribute it to a mugging. But as Brunetti pulls on the threads, the victim's lover, also a doctor at the American base, suddenly dies from a "drug overdose" -- supposedly a suicide--and Brunetti is now firmly convinced that these murders are connected. And he will quickly learn that there is absolutely nothing that he can do to bring the culprits to justice. Sometimes, however, fate has a way of twisting the tale of the devil himself. You can read a brief interview with Leon done by NPR's Sylvia Poggioli here.