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Summary
Summary
Donna Leon's charming, evocative, and addictive Commissario Guido Brunetti series continues with Suffer the Little Children . When Commissario Brunetti is summoned in the middle of the night to the hospital bed of a senior pediatrician, he is confronted with more questions than answers. Three men -- a young Carabiniere captain and two privates from out of town -- have burst into the doctor's apartment in the middle of the night, attacked him and taken away his eighteenth-month old baby boy. What could have motivated an assault by the forces of the state so violent it has left the doctor mute? Who would have authorized such an alarming operation? At the same time, Brunetti's colleague Inspector Vianello discovers a money-making scam between pharmacists and doctors in the city. But it appears as if one of the pharmacists is after more than money. Donna Leon's new novel is as subtle and fascinating as ever, set in a beautifully-realized Venice, a glorious city seething with small-town vice.
Author Notes
Donna Leon was born on September 29, 1942 in Montclair, New Jersey. She taught English literature in England, Switzerland, Iran, China, Italy and Saudi Arabia. She is the author of a Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery series. Friends in High Places, a novel from the series, won the Crime Writers Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction in 2000. German Television has produced 16 Commissario Brunetti mysteries for broadcast. She was a crime reviewer for the Sunday Times. She has written the libretto for a comic opera and has set up her own opera company, Il Complesso Barocco. Her titles Jewels of Pardise, The Golden Egg, By Its Cover, Falling in Love and The Waters of Eternal Youth made The New York Times Bestseller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Leon's 16th Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery, at once astringent yet lyrical, two rival police forces--Brunetti and his Venetian colleagues and the carabinieri--are both interested in a doctor who illegally adopts an Albanian infant. When three carabinieri break into the doctor's apartment and seize the child at night, they injure the doctor, leaving him mute. Much of the early action takes place in a hospital, and because Venetian hospitals appear only slightly less bureaucratic and Kafkaesque than their stateside counterparts, Leon's marvelous insights into Italian life, so sharp when she explores a military academy in Uniform Justice or glassblowers in Through a Glass, Darkly, aren't as fresh, sinister or compelling here. But once the IVs and bandages give way to vandalism at a pharmacy and the family secrets of a neo-Fascist plumbing tycoon, Leon regains her stride and the novel's last fifth is first-rate and masterful. Leon seldom delivers a "feel good" ending, choosing instead conclusions that are wise and inevitable while still being unsettling. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
On the face of it, there is very little crime in this latest installment in Leon's long-running and justly honored series starring beleaguered Venetian policeman Guido Brunetti. A case of police brutality sets Brunetti on the trail of an illegal-adoption ring and, from there, to a scam involving pharmacists and doctors. But genre readers waiting for the dead bodies to start piling up will have a long wait indeed; it isn't until the last 20 pages that any truly violent crime occurs. Leon's legion of fans, however, know that the Brunetti series isn't about crime as much as it is about more subtle human failings, and there are plenty of those here. Wherever Brunetti turns in this case, he is confronted by ethical dilemmas and by disastrously rigid responses to them. I don't have any big answers, only small ideas, he laments, while tussling with what to do about the immigrant who sells her baby, the couple who adopts it, the pharmacist who adds moral judgments to every prescription he fills. In some of the best contemporary crime fiction, the heroes are often overwhelmed by the riptide of violence that threatens to consume their lives; Brunetti is equally overwhelmed but by a more insidious foe: our compulsion to judge others and the way those judgments ruin lives. Nasty little bastard, Brunetti's wife, Paola, declares about one of the principal's in her husband's case. Most moralists are, Brunetti replies. --Bill Ott Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TANA FRENCH promises two whodunits for the price of one in her harrowing first novel, IN THE WOODS (Viking, $24.95), by linking the contemporary homicide of a 12-year-old girl from a small town near Dublin with the misadventures of three children who vanished while playing in the same wooded area 20 years earlier. While French resolves only one of these twinned mysteries, the intricate design of her storytelling is something of its own reward - although that might not appease readers who, having been lured into these thickets, find themselves hanging from a limb. In the view of Rob Ryan, a Dublin detective assigned to investigate the rape and murder of Katy Devlin (whose body is found on the site of an archaeological dig, draped across a Bronze Age sacrificial altar), "this case was too full of skewed, slippery parallels." If anyone has a right to that opinion, it's Ryan, who, unknown to all but his homicide-cop partner, Cassie Maddox, was one of the three playmates who disappeared from the town of Knocknaree in the summer of 1984 - and the only one who returned. Since Ryan never recovered his memory of the ordeal, he's less the omniscient narrator of the story than its flawed subject, a man tormented by a secret he can't recall. Tana French French is a bit too infatuated with her hero, giving as much gravitas to Ryan's sophomoric romping with his tomboyish partner as she does to his speculations about Katy's odd family and unreliable neighbors. But if they don't play well as romantic partners, Ryan and Cassie pull their weight on the job, yielding cleareyed insights into the many layers of life in small Irish towns. The way French tells it, the history of Knocknaree will never be whole until the dual mysteries of Katy's death and the disappearance of the children are resolved. Although she overburdens the traditional police-procedural form with the weight of romance, psychological suspense, social history and mythic legend, she sets a vivid scene for her complex characters, who seem entirely capable of doing the unexpected. Drawn by the grim nature of her plot and the lyrical ferocity of her writing, even smart people who should know better will be able to lose themselves in these dark woods. You know you're reading a Swedish policier when an elderly man disappears and the investigating officer immediately suspects suicide. But the question put to the missing man's daughter - "Has your father shown any signs of depression lately?" - might be asked of any of the characters in THE CRUEL STARS OF THE NIGHT (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95), Kjell Eriksson's moving follow-up to "The Princess of Burundi." Although the novel's focus holds steady on police efforts to locate Prof. Ulrik Hindersten when the retired Petrarch scholar vanishes from the house he shares with his daughter, compassionate attention is also paid to the other aged victims of an unknown serial killer - including one old farmer who was indeed contemplating suicide and left behind a plaintive note asking that someone care for the beloved maple tree on which he intended to hang himself. Not even the cops are exempt from the autumnal melancholy that pervades the story, with Detective Ann Lindell acknowledging (in Ebba Segerberg's sober translation) "a nauseating feeling of indifference" and casually writing off October as her "blues month." Why genre readers are tickled by such morbid views of suffering humanity is anyone's guess. Suffice it to say that Eriksson understands the pathology and explores it with the utmost tenderness. Donna Leon is the ideal author for people who vaguely long for "a good mystery," meaning a strong story with discreet violence, a wise detective who doesn't drink or brood too much, and a setting that's worth the visit. That Leon is also a brilliant writer should only add to the consistently comforting appeal of her Venetian procedurals featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, an immensely likable police detective who takes every murder to heart. As a devoted family man, Brunetti is profoundly shaken by the baby-snatching case he encounters in SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN (Atlantic Monthly, $24), and the sympathy he feels for the distressed father, a pediatrician at a local hospital, only intensifies when Brunetti learns that the baby was acquired through an illegal adoption. Even as this case is pursued to its bitterly sad ending, Leon allows her warmhearted detective to take what solace he can from the beauty of his city and the homely domestic rituals that give him the strength to go on. Ruth Dudley Edwards's rollicking satirical mysteries have heretofore been confined to the British Isles, but now that MURDERING AMERICANS (Poisoned Pen, $24.95) has gotten around to American academia, we can expect to hear howls from the heartland. Through some colossal error in administrative judgment, a liberal arts college in Indiana has invited Baroness Ida Troutbeck, the foul-mouthed, politically iconoclastic and altogether endearing heroine of this series, to grace its campus as a visiting professor. Once in residence, Lady Troutbeck (who insists on being called Jack) finds reason to investigate the behavior of the school provost and the suspicious death of the woman's predecessor. But the guilty pleasure of this farce is the spectacle of Jack tearing down the precepts of political correctness honored on American campuses, like diversity studies and the tortured nomenclature that designates Indians as "First Citizens." "I like amusing and constructive anarchy," Jack says, pausing in her efforts to stir up a student insurrection. Well, so do we, and no one brings down the temple with more outrageous wit and style than Ruth Dudley Edwards. In her harrowing first novel, set in a small Irish town, Tana French presents two whodunits for the price of one.
Guardian Review
Before I started to write this review of the 16th mystery in Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti series, I reread the first, Death at La Fenice , curious to see if there was a great difference. I was happy to find the first not at all tentative, and the latest in no way stale or perfunctory. Leon started out with offhand, elegant excellence, and has simply kept it up. There is, to be sure, the problem of all long-continued series - do the characters age, or do they exist in a kind of timeless present? Leon's topics have kept up to date, closely related to Italian history and politics since 1992; but the Brunettis' children, apparently trapped in eternal adolescence, are increasingly left out of the stories. That is a pity, for Raf fiand Chiara are most engaging characters. The portrait of a family - along with the subtle and vivid picture of Venice, and the enticing descriptions of what Venetians eat - is at the heart of Leon's books, giving them the warmth and vitality that balances out the darkness. Of course they are mysteries, with a crime and an ingenious solution, though seldom the rational, comforting, penny-drop solution of the whodunnit. The crimes in Leon's books are sometimes against humanity rather than an individual; the moral problems raised may be unsolved by arrest or punishment; and the criminals may be less criminal than their abettors in big business and government. One can in fact read the novels as a guide to Italian corruption, inertia, nepotism and cynicism. Leon, an American, has lived in Italy only since the 80s, but she seems completely Italian in the cold, resigned clarity of her view and in the apparent ability, which she shares with her principal characters, to enjoy daily existence and love her city while in bleak despair about the government, the future and life in general. Her website tells us that her books are translated into 20 languages, but not Italian. She says this is to save her from local celebrity, but Venice is not a very literary city, and I doubt she'd be much bothered. The reason for her reticence must go deeper. I wouldn't blame her if she doesn't want the Questura to know what she's been saying about them. In Suffer the Little Children she's even harder on the Carabinieri, who stomp into private homes and carry babies off to orphanages. But their moral outrage is committed in pursuit of a serious crime, since the baby in this story was illegally adopted. The interlocking complexities - political, emotional and ethical - that surround the adoption schemes and the police actions, and Brunetti's slow, patient search for the motivations behind it all, form an exemplary Leon plot. For those of us to whom plot is less interesting than story, the fascination lies in the easy narrative movement through the web of relationships in which Brunetti lives. And there is equal delight in his intense and complex bond with his extraordinary city. My favourite passage is a brief taxi drive in inland city traffic, as experienced by two Venetians. They find the car as exotic as most of us find the gondola, but far more awful. "My God," says the usually imperturbable Signorina Elettra, "how can people live like this?" Brunetti answers: "I don't know." I wonder if any of us knows. Ursula K Le Guin's Changing Planes is published by Gollancz. To order Suffer the Little Children for pounds 14.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/ bookshop Caption: article-newleon.1 One can in fact read the novels as a guide to Italian corruption, inertia, nepotism and cynicism. [Donna Leon], an American, has lived in Italy only since the 80s, but she seems completely Italian in the cold, resigned clarity of her view and in the apparent ability, which she shares with her principal characters, to enjoy daily existence and love her city while in bleak despair about the government, the future and life in general. Her website tells us that her books are translated into 20 languages, but not Italian. She says this is to save her from local celebrity, but Venice is not a very literary city, and I doubt she'd be much bothered. The reason for her reticence must go deeper. I wouldn't blame her if she doesn't want the Questura to know what she's been saying about them. - Ursula K Le Guin.
Kirkus Review
A baby-snatching leads Commissario Guido Brunetti not to the usual institutional corruption (Through a Glass Darkly, 2006, etc.) but to a more intimate kind of evil. Hours after his adopted son Alfredo calls Dottore Gustavo Pedrolli "papà" for the first time, the doctor and his wife, plumbing heiress Bianca Marcolini, are asleep in their Venice apartment. Five armed men break in, repel Pedrolli's feeble resistance and grab Alfredo. The abductors, amazingly, are carabinieri dispatched by an unknown complainant to end what was apparently an illegal adoption. But why did Captain Marvilli and his masked troops storm so violently into the apartment in the dead of night? After all, as Brunetti reflects, "this was not the United States." And why, given her fury over a brain-threatening injury to her husband, does Signora Marcolini seem so incurious about what's become of her son? These riddles lead Brunetti on a trip to a fertility clinic, where he and his boss's secretary, enterprising Elettra Zorzi, pretend to be a desperate, childless couple, as well as to a round of pharmacists, one of whom treats confidential medical information as a divine sword, and eventually to the unknown tipster, whose motive for betraying the adoptive parents is truly nauseating. Not a single murder, but the story would be strong enough without one even without a climactic assault whose only casualty is the characters' moral certitudes. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Commissario Guido Brunetti of Venice does what it takes to solve a case, whether it's having his aristocratic father-in-law arrange a meeting with a powerful political figure or playing the part of a wealthy infertile man who'll do anything to get a baby. After the Carabinieri (Italy's military police) rouse a prominent pediatrician in the middle of the night for illegally adopting his beloved 18-month-old son, Brunetti investigates related adoptions (in which an Italian man swears, falsely, that he fathered a child by a foreign woman) plus a scam in which pharmacists and doctors bill for bogus appointments. The two cases become entwined after the shop of an "exquisitely moral" pharmacist is vandalized. In her 16th book featuring Brunetti, CWA Silver Dagger Award winner Leon vividly illustrates the power of fatherhood, captures the nuances of Venetian politics, and provides a finish as satisfying as it is tragic. But what lifts this series far above the norm is the humanity of Brunetti and his family and the charm of Venice, where Leon has lived for 25 years. Brunetti and his wife, Paola, separately take delight in the wonders of their city; little wonder that their readers will, too. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/07.]-Michele Leber, Arlington, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
