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Summary
Summary
On a rainy morning, not long after the funeral of his mother, Commissario Brunetti and Ispettore Vianello respond to a 911 call reporting a body floating near the steps in one of Venice's side canals. Reaching down to pull it out, Brunetti's wrist is caught by the silkiness of golden hair, and he sees a small foot-together he and Vianello lift a dead girl from the water. But, inconceivably, no one has reported a missing child, nor the theft of the gold jewelry that she carries.
So Brunetti is drawn into a search not only for the cause of her death, but also for her identity, her family, and for the secrets that people will keep in order to protect their children-be they innocent or guilty. The investigation takes Brunetti from the canals and palazzos of Venice to a Gypsy encampment on the mainland, through quicksands of connections and relationships both known and concealed, as he struggles with both institutional prejudice and entrenched criminality to try to unravel the fate of the dead child.
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 (4)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Leon's latest Guido Brunetti novel begins and ends with funerals the first for Brunetti's mother and the second for an 11-year-old gypsy girl whose body washes up in Venice's Grand Canal. As he launches what he knows will be a fruitless investigation of the girl's death, Brunetti is assailed by the ironies of police work in contemporary Italy, where corruption is rampant and where his boss, Patta, king of the bureaucrats, prattles on about multicultural awareness while trying to protect the well-connected from any exposure in the matter of an insignificant gypsy's death. But just as Brunetti is incensed by the way his peers ignore the marginalized members of society, so is he appalled by the callousness with which gypsy fathers groom their young children for lives of petty crime. More and more in Leon's remarkably rich series, crimes have no solutions, and the problems of daily life yield no answers. And yet, as Brunetti reflects on his loss of the capacity for instinctive trust, we feel just that kind of trust in Brunetti himself, in the idea of a man overwhelmed by a malfunctioning society who soldiers on, doing what good work he can and finding solace in small moments of love and tranquility. It isn't much, but in lives bookended by funerals and filled with frustrations, it's what we have. This series becomes less about crime and more about daily life with each new entry, and as it evolves, it becomes clear that Leon deserves her place not only with the finest international crime writers (Michael Dibdin and Henning Mankell, for example) but also with literary novelists who explore the agonies of the everyday (Margaret Drabble and Anne Tyler, among others).--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist
Guardian Review
"All you've got to do is have the proper feelings, and make a business about how delicate your sensibility is." Although Paola, wife of Leon's Commissario Brunetti, is referring to modern orthodoxies, her words demonstrate how little times have changed since the 16th century. When the body of a 10-year-old girl is fished from Venice's Grand Canal, the post-mortem reveals that not only did the child have stolen jewellery secreted about her person, but she was also suffering from gonorrhoea. Brunetti's efforts to determine her identity take him from a rich family's canal-side apartment to a squalid gypsy camp on the outskirts of the city. He and his sidekick, Vianello, pick their way through a morass of confusion and prejudice from both sides - not to mention from the institution that they serve - to unravel the mystery of the dead girl's fate. Written in a powerful, economical style, with no tidy, sentimental ending, Leon's 17th novel is one of her darkest and most reflective. Caption: article-aprilcrime.2 All you've got to do is have the proper feelings, and make a business about how delicate your sensibility is." Although Paola, wife of Leon's Commissario Brunetti, is referring to modern orthodoxies, her words demonstrate how little times have changed since the 16th century. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
Commissario Guido Brunetti, of the Venetian Questura, pursues a pair of very different cases to equally inconclusive ends. At the gravesite following the funeral of his mother, Guido Brunetti meets Padre Antonin Scallon, a schoolfriend of Brunetti's brother who has been doing missionary work in Africa. Brunetti has never liked Scallon, so he's surprised when the priest asks his help in getting information about Brother Leonardo Mutti, leader of the Children of Jesus Christ. Agreeing to investigate Mutti, Brunetti (Suffer the Little Children, 2007, etc.) ends up spending considerably more time investigating Scallon himself before he's abruptly pulled away from his inquiries by an ugly discovery. A Romany girl is found drowned in the Grand Canal with two pieces of readily identifiable jewelry that didn't belong to her. Because of a lack of cooperation, the mystery of the girl's death looks even more impenetrable than Brunetti's investigation of the two rival preachers. The investigations are linked only by the establishment's hatred and fear of interlopers who threaten its control. By no means a model of plot construction, but as heartfelt and moving as Brunetti's best. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Political reality prevails over justice, and a child's death goes unpunished despite the best efforts of Commissario Guido Brunetti in Leon's 17th Venetian mystery. When 11-year-old Ariana Rocich drowns in a canal and goes unidentified for days, she begins to haunt Brunetti's dreams. But Ariana is a Rom, or gypsy, found with stolen jewelry items secreted in and on her person, a discovery that makes Brunetti's investigation particularly sensitive in the face of new departmental directives regarding multicultural issues. The book opens with the funeral of Brunetti's mother before segueing into a subplot about a religious charlatan; so religion, as well as politics, becomes a topic around the family table for Brunetti, wife Paola, daughter Chiara, and son Raffi. A devoted family man, Brunetti is deeply principled if not overtly religious: his character and moral compass in the face of bureaucracy evoke as much interest as the crimes he sets out to solve. American-born Leon describes her longtime home of Venice lovingly, and the ethical grounding she gives this novel lifts it above the norm. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ 1/08.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
