Donna Leon - "Drawing Conclusions"

Guido Brunetti's twentieth outing sees us return to Venice once again, and this time at the end of autumn, allowing Donna Leon to indulge in her trademark languid descriptions of that beautiful city as the days shorten and winter creeps in.

Drawing Conclusions opens with a woman returning from a holiday in the south of the country and discovering that her downstairs neighbour had collected her post. On attempting to collect it, she discovers that her neighbour has died of what looks like a heart attack. As there is some blood on the floor, she panics and calls the police - enter Brunetti.
Brunetti has often shown considerable tenacity in previous investigations, refusing to believe that inquiries should be stopped for any reason, and does so again here. He and Vianello wonder whether the elderly neighbour had "been caused to have a heart attack", particularly as their medical colleague Rizzardi is more evasive than normal in his discussions of causes of death. Thus begins an unusual series of inquiries, which often feel designed more to put Brunetti at ease rather than solve any potential crime. The investigation grows to encompass everything from refuges for victims of domestic violence, illegal immigrants and the "guests" of a private nursing home as the revelations gradually appear.

Leon's customary sense of humour is strongly evident throughout the novel. We first meet Brunetti being harangued by Vice-Questore Patta - not because of something he's done or failed to do - but because wine from the north of Italy is (apparently) not as good as that from the south. Brunetti is described as secretly wishing that the restaurant he's eating at would be attacked, so that in the confusion he could at least wound his superior.
Later, Patta's fury at not being informed (at approximately 3 in the morning) of the identity of the deceased knows no bounds. Brunetti is puzzled by this, until Patta explains that the woman in question was the mother of Patta's son's former vet - which is simultaneously an entirely plausible connection in Venice and proof of Patta's view of the world. There is also a very memorable exchange between Brunetti and the ambiguously-moral Signorina Elettra, in which the latter takes pity on government agencies with poor electronic filing systems, as well as explaining that she has carefully set an unpopular officer up as the "real" source of the hacking she has done over the years.

In many ways, though, Drawing Conclusions turns into a series of scenes in need of a plot. Leon's novels don't tend to rely on coincidence too much, but the eventual explanation of a motive feels quite tenuous here, as it deals with a completely unrelated series of events which have never been explained in the previous novels but which all the characters appear intimately familiar with. The final scenes of a Brunetti investigation tend to have an emotional "pull" of varying sorts - frequently, the criminal turns out to be unable to be prosecuted for all manner of reasons - but Brunetti's kid-glove confrontation of a suspect here feels more mawkish than dramatic, too.
There is also a very long exploration of domestic violence which only adds tangentially to the plot. Brunetti's investigations have touched on this issue before, and the scenes here give at least some indication of being "leftovers" from Leon's earlier novels which have been added into the current investigation to pad it out a bit.
Even the final resolution of the plot remains slightly obscure. The exact nature of the crime or crimes committed is never entirely clear - and neither, in fact, is whether they were committed at all. Brunetti's willingness to let the matter slide is admirable, and he's done that sort of thing before, but the fact that there may not strictly have been a "matter" in the first place (one potential crime is well outside the statute of limitations, at least) seems contrived.

All up, Drawing Conclusions is not Leon at her best. Over a series of more than twenty novels (she has published number 27 this year), a misstep like this can be readily excused. If nothing else, it reminds the reader just how good the best entries in the series are.

3.5 stars.