Time To Leave Venice

Death and Judgment is the last of these Donna Leon Commissario Brunetti mysteries I have around, and it's probably not a bad place to leave off. Throughout the books, Brunetti's dealt with the difficulty of pursuing people of status and influence. He's generally been unable to touch the real power players behind the crimes, forced to be content with their front men/fall guys. He's watched other honest officers who try to help get similarly stymied, if not transferred to a location likely to get them killed.

This is the first book I've seen him truly lose his cool. Not in a Steven Segal Out for Blood way. For Brunetti, it means going to the home of a murdered man, because he's convinced that man and his wife are mixed up in selling women for the sex trade, and basically yelling at the widow until she breaks down and confesses that yes, her husband was involved in that. She denies any actual involvement, of course.

The joke is, losing his temper may produce information, but it ultimately makes no difference. The people in the shadows cover their tracks well, and Brunetti's left back where he started, dealing with surface symptoms. In that way, I think it's less satisfying than The Slavers arc Ennis did in The Punisher. Frank Castle couldn't get to the people really driving the trade anymore than Brunetti could, but Frank did manage to dispatch anyone involved he could get in range of. That sort of behavior would have been wildly out of character for Brunetti, so I'm not advocating Leon have him hunt down and brutally murder people, but the ending does make him seem a bit too ineffective. He'd been warned of the people his suspect could implicate, but he still seemed content to let his guard down and go home to get some sleep.

His daughter, Chiara, plays a larger role in this story than she has in the previous ones, as she knows someone connected to the crime. I do find it interesting that Chiara tends to actually get some use in the stories, even if it's just as a tether for Brunetti to a world not tainted by corruption and violence. But Guido and Paola's son, Raffi, is practically a non-entity. He's mentioned by one parent or the other, lives there with them, even appears occasionally, but I've yet to see any significant interaction between him and his father. It made a certain amount of sense in the first book, when Raffi was in that stage where he sees corruption everywhere, and distrusts adults because he thinks they can't or won't see it. He'd supposedly snapped out of that once he noticed a pretty neighbor girl, but that only makes him less visible, even as a topic of conversation.