Friends in High Places

Venice’s Commissario Brunetti is surprised when a young man from the Ufficio Catasto shows up at his apartment. The bureau is converting its records to computer and they’re following up in person with the owners of properties that have documentation problems. After Brunetti’s initial worries about the status of his home, it recedes to the back of his mind when he doesn’t hear any more from the Ufficio Catasto. Then one day he receives a call from Rossi, the young man who had visited him. He’s concerned about something going on at the bureau, but dies in a fall before he can tell Brunetti what’s worrying him. Although the death is ruled accidental, Brunetti suspects murder. He knows something that others do not. Rossi was show more afraid of heights, and he wouldn’t willingly have put himself in the position to fall to his death.

Brunetti’s investigation is more satisfying than many of the others in the series. With very few initial clues, he and his team manage to solve the crime. However, the plot is weighed down by the very detailed explanation of the bureaucracy of the Ufficio Catasto, the Guardia di Finanza, and other Venetian or Italian government agencies. And once again justice eludes Brunetti, as the perpetrator will not have to pay for his crime. show less

Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti books are always a pleasure. I like the man, I like his family, I love the meals he eats, and I always become involved in the plot. In a country where corruption and Mafia-led intrigues are the norm, Brunetti himself is incorruptible, but he's a fallible and entirely likeable detective.

This time, he has a moral dilemma himself. Does he really have title to his apartment? And if not, should he pull the strings to regularise his position? While he's mulling things over, the official who gave him the news that his flat might not in fact 'exist', dies in an accident. Or is it murder? Brunetti elects to find out, and discovers more than he bargained for. No spoiler alerts here. Simply this. If you like show more Italy, if you like Venice, if you enjoy a good and involved thriller with believable characters, read this one. show less

Number 9 in the Guido Brunetti series. I’m enjoying this series set in modern Venice very much. I’ve always wanted to visit, but instead I’ll have to visit from afar in these stories. This book hits a little closer to home for Brunetti. A visit from a city official informing him that his apartment lacks official building permissions. Guido and his family have lived there for twenty years. This sets Guido on a quest that uncovers corruption and bribery in city and government offices in Venice that has been going on for decades. His investigation uncovers bodies, loan sharking and drug trafficking, thus leading him further and further into a deep, dark labyrinth which is the criminal underworld of Venice. The book moved along nicely show more and there were lots of conversations between Guido and his wonderful family which are a high point for me in these books. I was not satisfied with the ending though, and closed the book wondering what had just happened. 3 stars for me on this one because of what I thought was an unsatisfactory ending. show less

One of the things that's fun about reading Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti series is that it gives you a sense of what it's like to live in Italy, and specifically in Venice. The bureaucratic nonsense and the corruption obviously drive Brunetti crazy -- and yet we can see that he would not, could not, live anywhere else than Venice. In this book, Brunetti's family apartment is threatened with demolition because no one can find that permits were issued for its construction (it's a mid-20th-century addition to a building probably first constructed in the 15th!) Brunetti is doing his best to forget about this when he gets a phone call from the young bureaucrat who first notified him -- but it's on a police matter. Things go downhill from show more there. There is a subplot about drug abuse. Brunetti's interaction with his family, the estimable Paola and the children all of us wish we had, adds rather than detracts from the story. And the redoubtable Signorina Elettra is as helpful as usual. A fine entry in this great series. show less

Other reviewers have suggested that this would not be a good book to start a reader's acquaintance with Brunetti: I go along with that. The endemic corruption and bureaucratic incompetence in Italian life provide the ground-bass to all Leon's work but in this book these are the main players. Given the threat to Brunetti's home in the first chapter and his reluctance to call on his father-in-law to use his influenza to remove the worry, it is unsurprising that he is moodier than usual. He manages a fairly significant spat with Paola and even puts Signorina Elettra potentially in harm's way to further his investigations.

The violent death of possibly the only honest bureaucrat in the Ufficio Catasto (the land registry office) is at the show more centre of the plot but there is a sub-plot involving drug dealing and the associated deaths of young people which strikes at Brunetti's Achilles heel, his deep concern for his children. The son of the awful Vice Questore, Patta, seems involved in dealing leaving Brunetti with a conflict between his usual disdain for his chief's self-serving attitudes and his sympathy for a very worried father. The death of a young student of architecture, apparently from a drug overdose, leads to a perfect piece of writing from Leon describing the visit of the dead man's parents to Venice to identify the body. Thrown into this mix are very unpleasant money-lenders and scarcely less unpleasant descendants of a medieval Doge, arrogantly carrying the family name and nothing else.

This is one of those books where you feel you have got about half way through when you find that there are only a couple of short chapters left. Sometimes this is a reflection of the author's poor organisation or lack of imagination but Leon can't be accused of either. True, there are some loose ends but I was left with the impression that she was getting a lot of baggage off her chest concerning human failings and, having done so, she ended the story. The final pages allow Brunetti to exhibit uncharacteristic malice. I am sure he will be back to normal after some fegato alla Veneziana, a glass or two of Prosecco and a cuddle from Paola.

As an aside, we are told that, as well as enjoying Henry James, Paola is a fan of the Aubrey / Maturin stories of Patrick O'Brian. show less

Commissario Brunetti first discovers he is living in a grey area of legality and later assigns himself the investigation of probable murder of the young official who brought it to his attention. Also brought and excluded from his attention are many of the darkest areas of legal morass in Venice, and he does not emerge unsmudged, or in fact, entirely emerge. The darkest of these mysteries I've read, and not particularly satisfying.

The 9th novel in the series delves into the building market of Venice - suddenly it seems like Brunetti's apartment is actually illegally built - and some paperwork was never done thus leaving it into a legal limbo. Of course there is always an easy solution - get the father-in-law to assist and the paperwork will show up but Brunetti is too proud so decides to try to solve the issue using his own connections instead (one needs to appreciate the fact that everyone knows that this needs solving by connections and bribes and noone even thinks of other options...). Then the man who brought the news is found dead and Brunetti decides to dig a bit deeper - and finds not just the expected corruption but a much bigger scandal at the bottom of show more the building planning bureaucracy of the city. Not that one is too surprised of course. Add some money-lenders and people with no options and the story turns ugly very quickly. And yet, it stays very Venetian. show less