Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon

It is going to be slow going here for a while. I am trying to get through the basic textbooks for the courses I am taking this summer - and even just underlining or highlighting slows me down quite a bit. Interesting stuff though.

This was another reread. A new book of hers came up somewhere or other and I decided to go back and read some of the earlier ones. I love reading about Venice and these are very well researched. This particular one involves soldiers from the American army post Caserma Ederle in Vicenza. It is actually a NATO installation, but it was fun reading because Commissario Brunetti must go to Vicenza and the main area of interest to him is the base hospital. Leon describes it quite accurately - and I would know, having spent over a month there waiting for daughter two to be born. We lived a little over two hours away at Aviano Air Base - which is also mentioned in the story.

Venice is the most amazing place and Leon conveys that through her detective Brunetti who was born and raised there. I find it charming that he is aware of his attachment to the city and almost seems to feel sorry for anyone who isn't a Venetian. "It would have been easy for Brunetti to grow indifferent to the beauty of the city, to walk in the midst of it, looking and not really seeing. But then it always happened: a window he had never noticed before would swim into his ken, or the sun would gleam in an archway, and he would actually feel his heart tighten in response to something infinitely more complex than beauty." For five years I visited Venice any time I had an opportunity to do so, and never failed to see things that I had never seen before. I am guessing that Leon felt the same, and I like it that she made her native Venetian cop feel that as well.

Incidentally, the mystery itself is well crafted and the bad guy gets taken care of in the end. However, the crime which leads to the murders in this story exists at a level that is beyond the scope of any one police officer to deal with - even with connections in publishing and the aristocracy. Definitely not a "and they all lived happily ever after" finish.