Give Unto Others (A Commissario Brunetti Mystery)

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Some people are still wearing masks, there is talk about the lack of tourists and closed businesses, people hesitate to touch other people the way they would in normal conversations, the hospitals have restrictions, but other things are business as usual. Because Enrico Fenzo is an accountant, Brunetti suspects that the likely reason must be the finances of one of his clients. Donna Leon has always been good at character depiction and rounded description, but there’s a difference between that and a lot of superfluous verbiage; here there is far too much of the latter, I think. Talking of the state of play, I loved how Leon described the task of plotting out the characters to unravel the mystery. But I'll be hoping that Brunetti is back to pondering the classics as he sorts through ethical dilemmas.

It seems to take Brunetti an age to spot some pretty obvious pointers, there is almost no Brunetti family life and even Venice itself didn’t seem the essential character it usually is and I found the descriptions of it a bit laboured and familiar.

Six chapters and 50 pages and the first situation is not set up what with everyone pausing to look out the window with their fingers to their throats! The books are as much about Brunetti and his family and friends as they are about any possible criminal wrongdoing. On the bright side, Leon does give this one far more satisfying finish than some of the other books in the series. Yet his clients seem benign: an optician, a restaurateur, a charity established by his father-in-law. For now, my re-visits are through Donna Leon’s annual slice of thought provoking fiction: her brilliantly observed characters; her highly tuned eye spotting things most casual observers would walk straight past; her intelligent insight into problems both modern and timeless.

Elisabetta Foscarini, Guido knew her as a child, they were neighbours, who he has occasionally glimpsed on the streets through the years, asks him to look into her son-in-law, Enrico Fenzo, an accountant married to her daughter Flora. When speaking to the junior officer Pucetti about Signorina Elettra’s methods, Brunetti realizes that he wants to avoid “[getting] himself involved .

One of my favorite parts of the series is reading about Brunetti and his family life, and here that was moved to the very back with just a couple of appearances from Paola, so it was a bit disappointing. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Brunetti is approached by a woman who knew him and his family long ago, asking his “advice”; she is worried about her daughter because of the behaviour of the daughter’s husband. and there is a certain Netflix conversation with a colleague that cleverly disguises the real subject of their discussion from unwanted listeners.

This must be the longest running series I have read ; because of its subject matter, the human condition, it is both nothing new and something new in its recounting of yet another form of human frailty, to which there is no end. There are some long, tortured metaphors, likening the case to a pinball machine and then to the pandemic, for example, which I found frankly absurd, and I think if I'd read just once more about Brunetti waiting for answer in silence with yet another laboured explanation of why he didn’t speak, I might have said some rude words.

Whilst he's thinking about this, Brunetti encounters someone he's seen only occasionally since they were neighbours when he was a child. Sadly this volume had very very little of the last two categories which I missed but even so, my annual Venetian visit was still well worth it. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Of course, Brunetti and his team will wrap up everything but not without some big surprises and revelations that were never meant to see the light of day.