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Summary
Summary
"Leon . . . is so generous with the humanizing details that make this series special. There are long walks in Brunetti's warm company and lively talks with his clever wife and even more engaging father-in-law, who can see the appetites of a modern consumer reflected in a 17th-century portrait. As detective work goes, it's a tiny masterpiece of analysis."--Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
Donna Leon's eighteen novels have won her countless fans, heaps of critical acclaim, and a place among the top ranks of international crime writers. Through the warm-hearted, perceptive, and principled Commissario Guido Brunetti, Leon's best-selling books have explored Venice in all its aspects: history and tourism, high culture and the changing seasons, food and family, but also violent crime and political corruption.
In About Face, her latest mystery, Leon returns to one of her signature subjects: the environment, which has reached a crisis in Italy in recent years. Incinerators across the south of Italy are at full capacity, burning who-knows-what and releasing unacceptable levels of dangerous air pollutants, while in Naples, enormous garbage piles grow in the streets. In Venice, with the polluted waters of the canals and a major chemical complex across the lagoon, the issue is never far from the fore.
Environmental concerns become significant in Brunetti's work when an investigator from the Carabiniere, looking into the illegal hauling of garbage, asks for a favor. But the investigator is not the only one with a special request. His father-in-law needs help and a mysterious woman comes into the picture. Brunetti soon finds himself in the middle of an investigation into murder and corruption more dangerous than anything he's seen before.
Donna Leon's readership has significantly expanded with her recent books, including 2008's The Girl of His Dreams, her most successful hardcover yet. Coupled with a major marketing campaign for new trade paperback editions of key backlist titles from Penguin and audiobooks from BBC America Audio, About Face, an exceptional addition to the series, is sure to take her sales to new heights.
Author Notes
Donna Leon was born on September 29, 1942 in Montclair, New Jersey. She taught English literature in England, Switzerland, Iran, China, Italy and Saudi Arabia. She is the author of a Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery series. Friends in High Places, a novel from the series, won the Crime Writers Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction in 2000. German Television has produced 16 Commissario Brunetti mysteries for broadcast. She was a crime reviewer for the Sunday Times. She has written the libretto for a comic opera and has set up her own opera company, Il Complesso Barocco. Her titles Jewels of Pardise, The Golden Egg, By Its Cover, Falling in Love and The Waters of Eternal Youth made The New York Times Bestseller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Leon's 18th novel, Commissario Brunetti delves deeply into Venice's (literal and figurative) pollution, navigating the choked canals as he tries to solve the murder of a truck driver. When his father-in-law asks him to look into the background of a potential business partner, Brunetti becomes fascinated with the business partner's wife--a former beauty now ravaged by a ruinous face lift. If the story evolves slowly, David Colacci manages to keep listeners hooked. His deep and direct voice drives the narrative, and his seamless transitions from description to dialogue are particularly impressive given the book's range of accents, genders and vocal styles. Despite the strong projection of his voice, Colacci can still shift his tone with his vocal characters to convey two people talking in confidence. His interpretation of Leon's book proves an excellent example of how a narrator can improve the actual story. An Atlantic Monthly hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 23). (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In his eighteenth case, Leon's Venetian commissario Guido Brunetti once again puts human feeling before the need to close cases. And, as always, there are multiple cases to close (or not), each rippling out in many directions, pushing at the lives of both innocent and guilty. It begins with a dinner party at which Brunetti meets a charming and beautiful woman (though, apparently, with a weakness for plastic surgery) who wants to talk about classical Italian literature. Brunetti is taken by the contradiction, a plastic face shielding a scholar's mind, and finds himself intrigued by the woman's past conveniently so, it turns out, when his wife's father asks him to make inquiries about the woman's husband, a potential business partner. Meanwhile, a carabiniere investigator needs Brunetti's help in a case involving the illegal hauling of garbage. Soon the investigator is dead, and Brunetti is following the garbage trail to the doorstep of his Ovid-reading dinner partner. The signature elements of any Leon novel are present here the island-like tranquility of Brunetti's domestic life; his ongoing sparring with his bureaucrat boss but this time the focus is more on the central stories: the mysterious woman and the garbage scandal. Brunetti tackles environmental malfeasance as he does all the other kinds of rampant governmental corruption he encounters, recognizing that full-frontal assaults are never won by individuals against institutions. Instead, he chips away at the edges of the monolith, carving shreds of hope from seeming hopelessness. No wonder we find him such a comforting presence.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Ah, those Irish storytellers, those mysterious seanchai with their silver tongues and their hypnotic eyes - don't they just break our hearts? In DARLING JIM (Holt, $25), Christian Moerk writes seductively of one such bard, a devilishly handsome young man who calls himself Jim Quick and exerts such mesmerizing power over women that they follow him from town to town - some of them never to be seen alive again. We are first made aware of this otherworldly creature's lethal charms when the wasted bodies of the Walsh sisters, Fiona and Roisin, are found inside the house of their murdered aunt. "Slave Sisters Slain by Killer Aunt," one Dublin newspaper declares. But when a curious postman reads a journal (addressed to "anyone at all") that turns up in the dead-letter bin, a darker, more horrifying truth begins to surface. "We are already gone," Fiona Walsh alerts the reader of her diary. "Read this tale only to remember us." Niall Cleary, the woebegone postman who discovered the journal, is properly fascinated by Fiona's account of how she, her two sisters (Aoife, Roisin's twin, made it out of the house alive) and their eccentric Aunt Moira all fell under the spell of the vagabond storyteller. In a sweetly pathetic attempt to play storybook knight, Niall heads to Castletownbere, the picturesque hamlet in County Cork where the nightmare began, and unearths another journal before becoming lost in the more metaphorical thickets of the plot. Stripped to its structural bones, the story sounds like an erotic fairy tale run amok in alien literary forms. But while the conflation of diverse genres - murder mystery, romantic suspense, psychological thriller, folk legend - results in a wrap-up ending that overexplains it all, Moerk has his own powers of enchantment. Throughout the shifts in narrative voice and tone, the three Walsh sisters maintain their wonderfully modern vitality, while Jim remains a killer charmer in all versions of the story being juggled here: the murder mystery told in real time; the macabre love story disclosed in the journals; and the magical yarn Darling Jim spins about twin princes whose peaceable kingdom falls into ruin when one of them succumbs to his bestial nature and turns into a wolf. No wonder Fiona, Roisin and Aoife were spellbound. A soft snow falls lightly on Venice in ABOUT FACE (Atlantic Monthly, $24), Donna Leon's latest mystery featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, a sight so precious that "Brunetti closed his eyes from the joy of it." But it will take more than one snowfall to cleanse the ground-in corruption that's revealed when this simpatico police detective investigates the local connections to the murder of a man who owned a trucking company in Lombardy. Leon sounds an angry alarm about the environmental damage done when mafias are allowed to take over toxic-waste disposal, and Brunetti despairs of being able to defend his city, poised on the "welcoming and oh-so-unprotected waters" of its lovely laguna. It would be easy to punch holes in a contrived subplot, thick with symbolism, about a beautiful young woman whose face was ruined by cosmetic surgery. But who would want to, when Leon is being so generous with the humanizing details that make this series. special? There are long walks in Brunetti's warm company and lively talks with his clever wife and even more engaging father-in-law, who can see the appetites of a modern consumer society reflected in a 17th-century portrait. As detective work goes, it's a tiny masterpiece of analysis. It takes a strong woman to admit she did wrong - and then go after the man who put her in that awkward position. Louise Ure took up the theme in her first novel, "Forcing Amaryllis," in which a trial consultant with a heightened sense of responsibility for her younger sister resolves to kill the man who raped the girl. The guilt that the auto-mechanic heroine of her second novel, "The Fault Tree," feels for failing to go to the aid of an old woman under attack by home invaders compels her to go after the killers herself - even though she's blind. The sense of guilt is even more pronounced in LIARS ANONYMOUS (Minotaur, $25.95), which makes sense because Ure's narrator, Jessie Dancing, killed a man and got away with it. But even though she beat the rap, she bears the scars, and when the sounds of a murder in progress come through at the emergency call center where she works, Jessie finds a way to make restitution. Unrestrained by the housekeeping duties of a mystery series, Ure uses the freedom to push her themes to their limits. All three of her tough-minded novels take place in Tucson, which seems to produce plenty of strong women with blood in their eye. Writers write about dull subjects at their peril. For a while, WOMAN WITH BIRTHMARK (Pantheon, $23.95), a police procedural by the Swedish author Hakan Nesser, seems to take its style cues from its murder victim, who is described in Laurie Thompson's translation as "a bit of a bore." The only thing interesting about the poor man is that he was shot four times - twice in the chest and twice in the groin. When another man of no consequence is killed in the same manner, Inspector Van Veeteren, along with the reader, suddenly perks up, recognizing a good old-fashioned hunt-the-dogs-down device when he sees it. Although the melancholy inspector is the nominal head of this show, subordinates take on a big share of the load on a case that becomes a lot more exciting once the characters targeted for murder finally realize that they are being hunted down like the dogs they are. In Christian Moerk's thriller, a devilishly handsome young man exerts mesmerizing power over women.
Library Journal Review
With her 18th stellar entry in the Commissario Guido Brunetti series, Leon (Suffer the Little Children) continues to live up to the increasingly high standards set by each novel. Her latest brings the Venetian policeman into intertwining cases involving dangerous environmental hazards: mounting trash heaps and air and water pollution. As usual, the urbane, overeducated, laconic detective circumvents his self-indulgent, self-centered boss and other department dullards to solve a thorny murder case. Leon not only offers superb plotting and engaging dialog, but also captures the atmosphere of Venetian daily life. Thus, Brunetti enjoys frequent, leisurely meals with his wife and children. Leon's evocation of these meals is so delectable that readers feel as though they are participating in the repasts. For readers of literary mysteries, such as those by Deborah Crombie and Elizabeth George. Highly recommended for all public and university libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/08.]-Lynne F. Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.