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Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon [Commissario Brunetti #1] [review short: no spoilers]

A famous opera conductor with an awful secret is murdered, poisoned with cyanide, during intermission at the Venice opera. This is the first of the "Commissario Brunetti" series, and it's quite a competent mystery. The author has a knack for revealing aspects of her characters gradually and naturally over the course of the narrative, and readers get a fun mini-course in Italian cultural nuances as they read.

It's good enough that you'll want to read the next.

Finally, I'll mention one beautiful and mournful scene from this novel that stands out: Chapter 14, where Inspector Brunetti visits a dark, forgotten part of Venice to interview a very old, once-famous opera singer in her home. You can feel the loneliness right through the pages, it's so well done.

Notes:
* On what it's like living in a city like Venice that's slowly but surely evolving into a sort of outdoor museum for tourists and becoming less and less a place for actual Italians to live. 

* "Brunetti closed his notebook, in which he had done no more than scribble the American's last name, as if to capture the full horror of a word composed of five consonants."

* Brunetti's wife Paola always chooses a suspect at the beginning of any of his investigations; Brunetti considers it both charming and naive as his wife tends to pick the "too obvious" suspect, which is almost always the wrong suspect. Almost always.

* "Not for the first time in his career, Brunetti reflected upon the possible advantage of censorship of the press. In the past, the German people had got along very well with a government that demanded it, and the American government seemed to fare similarly well with a population that wanted it."

* On the thin layer of corruption underlying everything: characters will comment on things like how the corruption in Venice, such as it is, is still way less than in Sicily; or see for example another scene where Inspector Brunetti, out of sheer curiosity, directly asks a character how in the world she was able to get a permit to install skylights in her top floor apartment: she answers, bluntly, "I bribed the inspector," and then tells him the precise amount!

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