This is Donna Leon’s 15th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel set in Venice and once again the author succeeds in capturing the light and shade of a city that has plenty of both. As in this edition she even provides maps, including the island of Murano, so that the reader can follow the detective’s various per- ambulations in search of the solution to a mystery, also slipping into the story details of which vaporetti stops he uses when he’s not summoning a police launch to take him out across the lagoon to an inhospitable outcrop where, perhaps, a body has been found. Leon is good at portraying the social tensions, the rivalry between and even the resentments of, say, the people of Murano and those who live in other districts. In fact, a glass-blowing factory on Murano is at the heart of this story.
Brunetti receives a call from his trusty inspector Lorenzo Vianello telling him a friend, Marco, has been arrested during an environmental demonstration and can they get him out? It turns out that Marco was blameless but was simply rounded up by the over-zealous police.
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