Another competently written mystery from Donna Leon. I'd recommend this book--and series--to any Italophile, especially if you're curious about Venice.
This is the second "Brunetti" novel, and it starts with a dead man floating in one of Venice's canals: young, an American (the Italians could tell by his teeth), with a professional-looking knife wound, through his ribs into his heart.
The mystery deepens when Brunetti discovers the victim is from the US military, stationed at the American army base in Vicenza. And when Brunetti meets his superior officer, she strangely gives off an almost animal terror at learning of his death. Worse, she dies by a clearly staged "suicide" shortly thereafter.
This is a story about corruption, a theme explored in Brunetti #1 as well, but here it runs much deeper, to an international level: where those engaging in the corruption can't be touched and where the individual is powerless to stop it.
I wonder if it's a coincidence that I happened to finish this 1992 novel just days after an important Boeing whistleblower unexpectedly "committed suicide" amidst serious allegations of shoddy safety and engineering practices at the company. I wonder.
Notes:
* Caffe corretto: black coffee with a substantial splash of grappa. Some of the characters will have this with their first coffee in the morning.
* On the filthy canal water in Venice: Brunetti used to swim in it, today he jokes that "falling into a canal was an experience he prefer not to survive."; and he knew of older people when he was a child who used to use the salty water of the canal to cook because salt was an expensive and heavily taxed commodity, and the Venetians were quite poor back then.
* On the themes of the Americanization of Italy: both in the cultural sense, but also via direct "colonization" of Italy via American military bases.
* On the Italian perception of Americans: "At a desk just inside the door, to the right, set a young woman who could only be American... her teeth had that perfection common to most Americans and to the wealthiest Italians. She turned to him with a bright smile; her mouth turned up at the corners, but her eyes remained curiously expressionless and flat."
* It's interesting to see Patta, Brunetti's superior officer, who is politically connected and has pretensions to join the upper class of Italian society. He's a flat character but the reader quickly grows accustomed to the dynamic between Patta and Brunetti; the author usually pairs their dialogue with a fair amount of sarcastic internal mental commentary in Brunetti's head.
* Brunetti's wealthy father-in-law serves as a deus ex machina in this story, he knows everything about the various political intrigues of the country and with a phone call he can protect someone, figure out who's doing what, etc. He reminds me of Sato from the movie Inception, implausibly able to clear the way for Leonardo DiCaprio's character to enter the US with a mere phone call, just minutes before he enters Customs.
* Finally a paradox on living in and around endemic corruption: different characters are at different Kubler-Ross stages of grief about the various levels of corruption in Italy: Brunetti, as a police detective and a lifetime Venetian is in the stage of "acceptance" with much of Venice's endemic local corruption; it's normal to him. But he's somewhere between anger and despair with this much deeper, much more vile international corruption. His wealthy father-in-law on the other hand seems to understand and accept the truth of the deep corruption of his country, and yet he wants his daughter and son-in-law and his grandchildren to somehow maintain some level of innocence, avoid his deep cynicism about it.