Donna Leon - "About Face"

One of the joys of contemporary crime fiction is the range of settings which criminals and their law-and-order counterparts get up to their activities in. While the mean streets of London, New York and Los Angeles and other big cities are still very much the "default" setting for so many authors, there are series set almost anywhere you'd care to name. Scandinavia, of course, is very much the fashionable location these days thanks to a certain Mr Larsson opening the floodgates for a host of translations, but it doesn't end there by any means.

Just as "tourist-friendly", perhaps, is Venice. The atmosphere created by the labyrinth of calli, campi and palazzi lends itself almost perfectly to a tense, noir-ish plot. While the city is visited by millions of tourists every year, its population of locals is in fact quite small, which also adds in creating tension, as everyone seems to know everyone else and walls have ears. This is the world of the American expat novelist Donna Leon and her detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti. About Face is Brunetti's 18th appearance, and the series currently extends to 26 novels - the Venice of About Face circa 2009 is a very different Venice to that of Brunetti's first outing in 1992's Death at La Fenice, unsurprisingly.
Leon is a long-term resident of Venice, and clearly loves her adopted home town. This love shows through even in her well-known refusal to have her novels translated into Italian (although they're available in most other major languages), which seems to stem from the fact that Italian law enforcement and politics don't tend to come out looking quite so good over the course of one of Brunetti's investigations. She is also a master at evoking the city itself, with About Face taking place over a week or so in an oppressive winter during which the weather obstinately refuses to snow. The city that many readers would be familiar with from long summer days is nowhere to be seen, and yet still very familiar.
A strong feature of Leon's novels is their anchoring in reality. Brunetti has an office in the real Questura di Venezia, which is in a real location not far from St Mark's Square (and in fact not far from a surprisingly good value hotel, but that's another story). The canals he walks beside are real, the hospital where autopsies are performed is real and so on. Even the food his wife Paola cooks for his family - lovingly described throughout the series - is authentic. So authentic is the series, in fact, that walking tours and recipe books have been prduced for die-hard fans. Truly, this is a case of life imitating art!

About Face begins in a customarily enigmatic manner. Brunetti and his wife have been invited to dinner by his parents-in-law, Conte Orazio Falier and his wife Donatella. During the meal, Brunetti is seated next to the strikingly beautiful Franca Marinello, who shares his love for classical literature and spends much of the meal discussing Cicero. The Conte takes Brunetti aside and asks him to find out any information he can about Marinello's husband, industrialist Maurizio Cataldo, as the two men are considering going into business together.
So far, so very Venetian. Many of Brunetti's cases begin without an explicit concern of illegality, again returning to the fact that everyone seems to know everyone in Venice. No sooner has Brunetti begun his unofficial investigations, however, than he is introduced to Maggior Guarini of the Carabinieri, who also needs some assistance regarding an informant who was murdered.
These two investigations form the backbone of the novel, and while it's no spoiler to say that they are connected, they aren't connected in anything like the most obvious manner, a trick that Leon has nearly perfected over her series.

While it's entirely possible to start the Brunetti series from anywhere, it is always useful to have at least a general outline of the supporting characters. As well as Brunetti's parents-in-law and his literature-academic wife (whose devotion to Henry James is a source of considerable humour throughout the series), Brunetti also has a son and daughter - although Raffi and Chiara don't play major roles in this novel.
The real charm of About Face comes from Brunetti's interactions with his colleagues. The idealistic Ispettore Vianello makes an appearance, although not as much as in other entries in the series, as does the incomparable secretary-slash-hacker Signorina Elettra, to whom Brunetti constantly turns for information about everyone from Cataldo to Guarini's informant (and Guarini himself). The cheerful insouciance with which Elettra is able to "find out" information from everything from the tax office to the Carabinieri is probably the major reason that Leon doesn't want to be translated into Italian, as this invariably leads to discussions about the ethics and morals of breaking (or at least bending) the law.
Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, the wildly egotistic overseer of the Questura also makes his customary appearances. Patta tends to be used as a comic foil throughout the series, but About Face takes a slightly more serious tone so we don't see as much Patta (or his offsider, Lieutenant Scarpa) as we might otherwise.

As well as providing a satisfying - and thoroughly unexpected - solution to an otherwise baffling series of events, Leon is careful to deploy her trademark dark humour about Italy to its full effect. Brunetti and Paola trade epigraphs from their favourite authors about politics, both concluding that these high ideals couldn't possibly work in Italy, for example. Chiara - who tends to the idealistic - also makes a memorable point when wondering what the consequences should be for having micro-particulates in the air "above the legal limit" (should people not be allowed to breathe?), only for Brunetti to explain that they live in a country where there tend not to be many consequences for people who break the law.

As should be well and truly obvious from the foregoing, I'm a big fan of Leon's work. Having read all the Brunetti novels to this point in the series, I can only say that this is as good as any of the others and I look forward to even more dastardly acts in the city of canals.

Five stars.