A Sea of Troubles by Donna Leon

Who was it just a couple of books ago that turned a cartoon character into a real one? Right - it was Dana Stabenow in Midnight Come Again, she took cartoon cop, Chopper Jim, and made him into a replacement for Jack Morgan. It surprises me how often I find similar things in books by different writers. In this book, Leon reinvents Signorina Elettra.

Signorina Elettra, the incredibly beautiful, impeccably clothed in Milan's latest, unfailingly capable, unapologetically manipulative of the idiot Vice Questore Patta, whose computer skills (and catalog of friends in the right places) far exceeds those of the boy hacker genius in Mankell's Firewall, and whose creativity with bookkeeping knows no bounds - yes, that Signorina Elettra becomes a real person rather than an office goddess.

Of course, when she actually fell for the guy, you could almost see his shirt turn red before your very eyes. But even with a novel's worth of remake, the final scene of a bedraggled and half-drowned Elettra with chunks of hair shorn off at the scalp searching the beach for her missing lover is truly stunning. It makes me want to read the next one to see what happens next - guess that's the point.

For some reason, perhaps because Leon rather batters the reader with it in Brunetti's musings, but I was really struck with the general acceptance of governmental corruption and incompetence, and the flip side - the assumption that cheating the government is not only reasonable, but appropriate. Here we deplore, without surprise, governmental waste, fraud, and abuse, but I really think that most of us are comparatively honest in our dealings with governmental authority. Maybe that is because perhaps our government is institutionally corrupt, but perhaps not so stupid as Leon portrays the Italian government. This may be the first of the Brunetti books in which Guido does not have to call on his father-in-law, the count, for help and inside information. And this is the first one in which there has been such a display of contempt for the Carabiniere. If I have my cops sorted out correctly, the force to which Brunetti belongs, housed at Venice's Questura, is the equivalent of the Venice Police, the Carabiniere are more or less like the State Police, but I do seem to remember that they have some national connection, as well.

Brunetti's character seems to have changed a little, too. Of course, Vice Questore Patta was on vacation for the entire duration of the book - I know it always changed my approach to the job when certain tin-pot dictators of my acquaintance were away from the scene of "trying to get it done."