Fatal Remedies

Rating:
Summary: moral dilemmas
Review: Donna Leon writes mysteries set in Venice. Her themes and plot treatments differ from the run-of-the-mill by their focus on moral dilemmas. In Fatal Remedies, there are several such. Guido's wife Paola has decided to take action against the outrageous sex/travel trade to Asia, which involves the exploitation and abuse of young girls. The means she settles upon are in strong and direct conflict with her husband's career and his need to uphold the law regardless of his personal feelings. Leon explores the nature of their marital relationship and the need of husband and wife to maintain separate identities with the freedom of action that that requires. Guido is a profoundly moral man who understands how to love, in contrast to the popularly accepted image of the Italian male. The solution of this novel's crimes and conflicts is surprising, believable, and anything but trite. Character is what makes Leon's writing so satisfying.

Rating:
Summary: Decent, but nothing Great
Review: This is the first of Leon's books I've read, although it is apparently the eighth in her police procedural series set in Venice and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. It starts off with a nice twist, with the Commissario's university professor wife deliberately breaking the display window of a travel agency she believes profits from sex tours to southeast Asia. Hers arrest and subsequent repetition of the vandalism/protest obviously creates a number of problems for the Commissario. Professionally he is placed on administrative leave, and at home husband and wife must face differing beliefs in the relationships between morality, law and justice.

Then everything gets a whole lot more complicated when the nominal owner of the travel agency is found murdered. For reasons that aren't ever properly explained, the Commissario is assigned to lead the investigation despite the obvious conflict of interest. Non-Italian readers may just have to chalk it up as another Italian idiosyncrasy. That's actually one of the pleasures of the book-the way Leon subtly incorporates Italian culture throughout the story. Examples include the constant ducking into bars and cafes for drinks and snacks, highly flexible work hours, lengthy lunches at home, and the offhand banality of tax fraud. To fill out the Commissario's portfolio, there is a subplot involving the witness to a bank robbery and possible Mafia intimidation.

The result is a credible, if not exactly dense, procedural built on several social concerns. One flaw is that one never really gets much of a sense of Venice from the book, it felt like it could have been any Italian city. The other flaw is the Commissario's repeated reliance on a uber-hacker secretary who provides him with all manner of data. She's a wholly believable character with unbelievable skills who's far faster and better than any real-life hacker. Those minor complaints aside, it's a diverting read, albeit unlikely to have me scrambling to track down the previous seven in the series.