Recommendation: "Trace Elements: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery"

By David Herold
Originally published in the April 2020 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

This is a good time to travel to Venice…in the imagination, by reading one of Donna Leon’s novels. Born in New Jersey, Leon (who specialized in Jane Austen in graduate school) came to be familiar with northern Italy and the beauty of Venice—its geography, its foods, its fashions, and its people. In 1992, past the age of forty, she wrote her first Brunetti police procedural about a disliked opera conductor whose murder is solved by the cultured, history loving, essentially balanced and happy Commissario. Death at La Fenice is ​the first in a long series, a new book appearing almost annually up to this year. An examination of our library revealed forty of her books on the shelf, plus four volumes checked out.

​Leon’s 2020 title, Trace Elements, is a recent donation to our collection. The secondary characters are familiar from previous books. Vice-Questore Patta, Brunetti’s superior, is vain and fundamentally dishonest. Patta’s secretary, Signorina Elettra Zorzi, guilefully undercuts his authority as she perverts privacy law with her computer to aid Brunetti’s investigations. All in the police force are cynical; they bend or withhold 

information, especially when searching for it during interrogations.

​I enjoy Donna Leon’s mysteries for the exquisite plots. Though I fail to guess the outcome, I know justice seldom will triumph totally, if at all. I enjoy stepping into the police boat with the Commissario to have the pilot motor us up the Grand Canal to the lagoon, or to some quiet dock where I step off with the inspector to observe him question an informant or suspect. And watch the departing pilot maneuver the boat in an illegal turn to save a few moments of time. ​