The Temptation of Forgiveness

January 15, 2018
In Leon’s thought-provoking 27th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel (after 2017’s Earthly Remains), Elisa Crosera, a university colleague of Brunetti’s wife, fears that her teenage son has fallen prey to unidentified drug dealers and approaches him for help. Armed only with an informant’s tip, the Venetian policeman checks into the activities of a longtime dealer recently released from prison. When Crosera’s accountant husband, Tullio Gasparini, is found on a bridge, suffering from serious head injuries, Brunetti wonders whether Gasparini was pursuing his own investigation and posed a threat to his son’s drug connections. As Brunetti looks into Gasparini’s movements and background, he uncovers strange behavior by Gasparini’s aged aunt that may point to more sinister doings. Amid the procedural aspects of the case, vivid descriptions of Venice, and interludes with Brunetti’s pesky superior, Leon offers intelligent reflections on the fallout that can harm both innocent and guilty in the quest for justice. Agent: Susanna Bauknecht, Diogenes Verlag (Switzerland).

February 1, 2018
A dying drug dealer and an elderly woman dressed in head-to-toe satin are among the lifelong Venetians whose apartments we visit, alongside Commissario Guido Brunetti, in Leon's leisurely 27th mystery.As the book opens, Brunetti has two unsettling meetings. First, his boss, the pompous and dim Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, calls him into his office to ask about rumors that someone at the Questura has been leaking classified information--and possibly also spreading gossip about Patta's henchman, Lt. Scarpa. Then Brunetti is visited by a woman he recognizes as a colleague of his wife, Paola, who teaches English literature at the university. Professoressa Elisa Crosera thinks her son is in trouble, probably with drugs, and wants Brunetti to solve her problem by arresting whoever's been selling to the students at the boy's expensive private school. "Ah, how wonderful to be able to do that, Brunetti thought. Arrest them and keep them until they went for trial and then have the judges send them to prison....Pity it didn't work that way." Brunetti checks to make sure the Carabinieri is investigating the problem of drugs in the schools and then, "his conscience salved," puts it out of his head--until a week later, when the professoressa's husband is found unconscious at the bottom of a bridge, unlikely to ever wake up. Could he have threatened a drug dealer? Or perhaps something untoward was going on in his job as an accountant? And what does his elegant but infirm aunt have to do with it? Leon provides the usual pleasures of walking the streets of Venice with Brunetti, guided by the "Venetian system of batlike echolocation" that helps him get around. It's good to see Brunetti admiring his colleague Claudia Griffoni's professional skills and also good that he keeps it to himself when he admires her looks. No one wants their favorite Venetian detective sexually harassing another commissario.The mystery isn't much to write home about, though the last few pages do provide Leon's trademark moral ambiguity--even the perpetrator is sympathetic--and, as always, it's a pleasure spending time in Brunetti's world.

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February 15, 2018
A typical case for Leon's Venetian police commissario, Guido Brunetti, begins with a request for help and moves from there to a crime; with the investigation that follows comes the agonizing ambiguity that has always been at the heart of this richly rewarding series: guilt and innocence in the eyes of the law, Brunetti knows, rarely capture the human truth behind the apparent wrongdoing he has uncovered. So it is here when a friend of Brunetti's wife comes to him concerned that her son is involved in drugs; shortly thereafter, the woman's husband incurs serious brain damage from a fall that may not have been an accident. The two events seem related, but how? As Brunetti pulls at the dangling threads in this case, he finds himself obligated to take actions whose collateral damage outweighs the meager benefits of solving a crime. Meanwhile, he faces a similar crisis at the Questura, where his longtime collaborator, the wily Signorina Elettra, may have stepped over a line that Brunetti can't erase. Another powerful exploration of the injustice of justice from a master of character-rich crime fiction.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Guido Brunetti may be the most beloved protagonist in crime fiction, and if his shoulders are stooping over so many encounters with human tragedy, his fans will feel only excitement at the prospect of joining him in his twenty-seventh adventure.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)