By Donna Leon
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 288 pages, $22.00)
Donna Leon’s 33rd installment of her immensely popular Commissario (detective inspector) Guido Brunetti series shows that at 82 she still has a literary fastball. And that she knows how to keep series characters fresh and alive.
The plot in Refiner’s is complex, suspenseful, well-paced, and believable.
Through her able and literate creation, Guido, Leon still beguiles, amuses, and sometimes gives us an insight into that vanity fair that is the human enterprise, like good literature always has. She’s one of the handful of writers in the crime/ mystery/detective section of the book store who are way more than mere genre writers offering up a few hours diversion from the day-to-day frustrations of real life. (READ MORE from Larry Thornberry: A Mystery Author’s Memoirs Are Appropriately Mysterious)
Guido’s patch is Venice. This would be Italy, not Florida. Gondolas, not golf carts. A water-bound world that New Jersey native Leon loved so much on first visiting that she made it her home for 30 years. She knows from Venice. And she’s brought this unique city and those who sail in her to life for millions of readers, beginning with Guido’s first case, 1992’s Death in La Fenice. All of the Brunetti novels are still in print.
A few years back, mostly in search of anonymity and to escape Venice’s pollution and flood of tourists, Leon moved to a small village in Switzerland. This must have given her a severe case of cultural whiplash, leaving loosey-goosey Italy for uber-orderly Switzerland.
Most adults realize that all large organizations — including police and military ones — are self-protecting bureaucracies. Those in high positions in these are at least as concerned, too often much more concerned, with the organization’s public image and the effect this has on next year’s budget than they are in the stated mission.
Leon explores this verity in A Refiner’s Fire. Guido’s Venice Police Department is no exception to this melancholy truth. Nor is the Carabinieri, a police/military mix that probably makes no sense outside of Italy. Squalid butt-covering by these two agencies enables a sordid and violent criminal enterprise that Guido, with his colleagues Commissario Claudia Griffoni, and the team’s researcher and computer whiz nonpareil, Signorino Elettra, have to sort, at considerable risk to their careers and persons.
It all starts in the wee hours of a spring morning when two gangs of juveniles engage in a non-lethal but noisy dust-up in public. Pushing, shoving, name-calling, minor fisticuffs, and a lot of male strutting and posturing. Dreary stuff. Police break it up, arrest the mini-gladiators, who are promptly released to their parents. Save for a 16 year-old boy, one Orlando Monforte, who says he’s afraid to notify his father (with good reason as it turns out). So Griffoni volunteers to walk him home. This act of kindness does not go unpunished.
Shortly after this unremarkable event, a cheesy lawyer with a history of even cheesier clients and tactics, presents himself in Guido’s office. He claims to represent a client making the preposterous claim that Griffoni, a lovely woman who could have her pick of adult men, had made sexual advances at young Orlando. This turns out to be a head-fake to divert police attention from a criminal enterprise headed up by Orlando’s father, Dario, and from a case of made-up valor.
Dario Monforte had been known in Italy as a hero. For home consumption he had risked his own life to save comrades during a bombing of the Italian compound in Iraq. The truth of his actions that night, and of the weeks leading up to it, were far less noble than this official version, and the Carabinieri’s incompetence would have been embarrassing if revealed. Thus the faux hero, whose behavior does not improve when he returns to Italy. (READ MORE: The Road Well Traveled: Exploring the History of Literary Journeys)
The plot in Refiner’s is complex, suspenseful, well-paced, and believable. Guido and his team solve the sorry business and bring it to a literally fiery ending. But while the plot is properly satisfying, and keeps readers guessing to the end, this story, like all of Leon’s work, is character-driven. The rich, always diverting, and finely-drawn characters being Guido, his wife Paola, and Griffoni, who we learn more about in this episode.
If I have a tiny nit to pick with Leon, it’s that I’d hope she would either use fewer Italian words and phrases in her stories or provide a glossary. Some of these words and phrases are hard to determine, even from context, whether they are names of people, places, organizations, or food items. But this has not been too much of an obstacle to my reading pleasure. It probably hasn’t hobbled many others either.
For those who share my addiction to detective fiction but have not sampled Donna Leon’s work, I recommend adding her to the list of writers to turn to when indulging your habit. Long-standing fans of Leon’s work, which includes me, look forward to Guido #34.