I have enjoyed the Brunetti books I have read, but for me this one wasn’t all that good.
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. Brunetti allows old loyalty to draw him into an “unofficial” investigation, which slowly - very slowly - begins to uncover possible malfeasance.
Frankly, I found it something of a slog, certainly for the first two-thirds. 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. 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. 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. Later, things picked up a little as Elettra, Vianello and Claudia become more involved in the off-the-books investigation, but in the end the denouement didn’t convince and relied on what I thought was some pretty thin psychology.
I did finish the book, with a little skimming, but I found it a disappointent. It’s not bad, but it’s not that great either, I’m afraid.
(My thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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