March 1, 2004
The crime at first seems an open-and-shut case: a Romanian housekeeper, accused of brutally murdering her miserly, elderly Venetian employer, is killed while fleeing the police. But when a neighbor steps forward to clear the housekeeper's name, Commissario Guido Brunetti seeks to find the real killer, especially when he learns that the original officer on the case is his enemy, the malevolent Lieutenant Scarpa. Like Leon's other elegant Venetian mysteries (Uniform Justice), the intricate plot here resembles the city's narrow and crooked calli, "often leading to dead ends or branches that [take] the unsuspecting in the opposite direction to the way they wanted to go." The pleasure for readers lies in accompanying Brunetti as he navigates these labyrinths of "rancours and animosities...and obstacles and wrong turns" in his scrupulous quest for justice. Along the way, readers are also treated to evocative portraits of Venice and its people and mouthwatering descriptions of its food. Fans will snap this up. Strongly recommended for most mystery collections.-Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 1, 2004
Leon's devoted American fans endured a seven-year wait before " Uniform Justice" and " Noble Radiance "landed on our shores last year. Hardly any waiting this time, as Guido Brunetti makes a quick reappearance, once again embroiled in a case whose moral ambiguities weigh heavily on the beleaguered but warm-hearted Venice cop. An extremely unpleasant elderly woman, the scourge of her neighborhood, has been savagely murdered, and her Romanian housekeeper, herself killed while running from the police, has been tagged as the obvious perp. The facts don't add up, however, and Brunetti, over his superiors' objections, won't close the case. A familiar crime-fiction premise, to be sure, but Leon, as always, looks for nuance behind the formula. She finds it in the victim's relatives, all severely flawed figures but all sharing a bedrock humanity that resists caricature, and, of course, she finds it in Brunetti's lovingly detailed but never sentimentalized family life--always the greatest source of pleasure in a series that reminds us again and again just what "character-driven" really means.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)