Earthly Remains - Donna Leon

Commissario Guido Brunetti needs a vacation.  In order to stop one of his policemen from making a serious mistake, Brunetti fakes a heart attack.  The doctors, however, tell him he needs to take a break  from the constant stress of his job.  A relative of Paola's has a villa on one of the islands, so Brunetti goes there, alone, for two weeks.

His plan is to read and swim and ride bicycle and isolate himself from the world.  He discovers that the man who maintains the villa, Davide Casati, was a friend of his late father's.  They had rowed together.  Casati asks Brunetti if he'd like to row.  They spend their days rowing in the lagoon and visiting Casati's beeshives.  Casati says his bees are dying.  He says that he killed them and that he killed his wife, who died of cancer.  Brunetti doesn't understand why he says that.  Casati disappears after a storm and his daughter asks Brunetti to find him.

I read my first Donna Leon / Brunetti mystery in 1999, so I'm a long-time fan.  Several of her recent books have dealt with the gradual destruction of Venice and the lagoon from climate change, pollution, and the dumping of toxic waste.  I still enjoy the books and I appreciate Leon's emphasis on environmental and ethical issues.   But I miss Paola, with her constant reading and cooking, who appears only briefly in these later books.  These books introduced me to prosecco, so, thank you, Donna Leon!

The Waters of Eternal Youth / Donna Leon

Donna Leon is back in the saddle.  Almost literally.  I've been a fan of hers for twenty years, but her last few haven't been very satisfying.  I admit that I like reading about Commissario Brunetti's home life, about the food Paola cooks, the books they read, and it seemed to me that there has been less of that lately.  Some of the books also had incomplete endings.  As a mystery reader, I like resolution at the end of a book.  But this one was good, I read it in two days.  I could barely put it down.

A friend of Paola's mother, an elderly contessa, asks Brunetti to look into a 15-year-old incident.  Her granddaughter fell / was pushed / was thrown into a canal when she was 15.  It was unlikely an accident because she was terrified of water after almost drowning as a child.  A drunk man jumped in and pulled her out, but when she awoke from a coma, it was clear that she was brain damaged.  Her brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long.

The contessa is wondering if she had been the cause of the incident, or if she could have done something to prevent it.  The girl, Manuela, had been different in the months before the accident, withdrawn.  She had been a devoted horseback rider and her grandmother had refused to pay for her horse's board because Manuela's mother only spent the money on drugs and alcohol and then asked her ex-husband, Manuela's father, for more.  Could Manuela have tried to commit suicide?  The contessa would like to know if she's at fault before she dies.

There isn't much to go on, but Brunetti and Commissario Griffoni, with help from the amazing Signorina Elettra, find connections between the old accident and a recent murder, the murder of the man who pulled Manuela from the canal.

The ending is satisfying and I enjoyed the book very much.  Thank you, Donna Leon!

Falling in Love - Donna Leon

Donna Leon is back!  I love the Commissario Brunetti series, but I haven't really enjoyed the last few books.  I think it's because they dealt with political or social issues that don't particularly interest me. I did admire Beastly Things because Leon showcased slaughterhouses, and animal welfare is something I fight for.

Anyway, Falling in Love is a good, authentic mystery.  Flavia Petrelli, opera star and an acquaintance of Brunetti's, is singing in Tosca at La Fenice.  A mysterious fan is frightening her, sending her hundreds of yellow roses, to opera houses in different cities and, in Venice, to her apartment door.  She doesn't want to make a big thing of it, but she's unnerved.  At dinner one night, she tells Brunetti what has happened.  Although he doesn't feel that it's a police matter, he agrees to investigate a bit.

Things step up a notch when a young singer Petrelli complimented is pushed down a flight of stairs and Petrelli's ex-lover, whose house she's staying at while in Venice, is attacked.  This makes things more serious and definitely a police matter, so Brunetti digs deeper.  A very valuable necklace points him in the right direction.

The ending is dramatic.  I saw it coming, as you will, but it's a good one anyway.  I can almost hear the music.