DEATH AND JUDGMENT

A grim prologue sets the tone for Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti's fourth case (Dressed for Death, 1994, etc.)—even though it takes quite a while to hook up the spectacularly fatal truck crash that opens the novel to the relatively quiet shooting, aboard a Venice-bound train, of former city Counsellor Carlo Trevisan. Brunetti's own teenaged daughter is only too eager to dig up dirt on her schoolmate's family—mother Trevisan's horror when Francesca contracted herpes, both parents' long-standing fears that she might be kidnapped—but Brunetti is stalemated until he connects the murder to the apparent suicide of Paduan accountant Rino Favero, who carried Trevisan's phone number but not his name. Taking a closer look at a disreputable bar both of these stolid businessman patronized—and following the trail of a pair of eyeglasses left behind by Favero's last dinner companion—Brunetti, again helped by his daughter, uncovers a plot that focuses the usual moral and governmental corruption endemic to Leon's Venice in a sharply painful way. Innocence corrupted in more ways than you can imagine. The first of Leon's books to knit together all her strengths: endearing detective, jaundiced social pathology, and a paranoid eye for plotting on a grand scale.