Donna Leon - "Beastly Things"

2012's Beastly Things is Donna Leon's 21st outing of Commissario Guido Brunetti. Just like the wines Brunetti seems to spend a lot of each novel drinking, he really only gets better with age.

Beastly Things begins with Brunetti talking to forensic examiner Ettore Rizzardi about an unidentified man whose body was found floating in one of the canals. The man was dressed neatly, and had an unusual physical condition, both of which seem to be clues to his identity. Brunetti also can't shake the feeling that the man's face is familiar, but can't place where he's seen him before.

Before too long, Brunetti and his good friend Lorenzo Vianello are discovering that the man was a vet on the Venetian mainland and was connected to an abbatoir further inland. The revelations of what was really going on at the abbatoir form much of the plot of the novel.

So far, so deceptively simple. But of course, a Donna Leon novel isn't just about the plot. There's so much more going on. Here, for example, Brunetti's children have both started at university and are rapidly discovering that they want to be vegetarians, which plays into Brunetti's own discoveries about how cattle are killed for beef.
Much of the plot involves Brunetti shuttling back and forth from the mainland - almost too much, to be honest - and this gives Leon the chance to ruminate on the differences between the Venice the tourists know and love, and the somewhat seedier towns surrounding it.

Leon's customary humour about the quotidian frustrations of Italian life is also present in droves here.
Brunetti has a wonderfully entertaining discussion with Signorina Elettra about the futility of Vice-Questore Patta's son continuing to take (and fail) his exams to become an accountant. This leads into the typical reservations that Brunetti himself has about the potential influence his father-in-law could exert over his career, given that the man is of noble descent.
In another scene, Brunetti and Vianello muse about the legality and morality of using Signorina Elettra - and her friend at the telephone company - to obtain vast amounts of information about key suspects in the investigation. I've sometimes wondered if Elettra isn't close to being a deus ex machina for Leon to wallpaper over what should properly be weeks or months of painstaking leg-work, but the explanations all the characters give for her abilities and their willingness to use them are at least plausible. This time, the scene extends as far as Vianello trying not to tell the young police-boat captain Foa that having a girlfriend and a fiancee are not mutually-exclusive concepts.
The real standout here, though, is a sort of half-subplot dealing with Brunetti's wife trying to establish what to do about an academic appointment at the university. In typical fashion, Brunetti's advice is couched in terms of his reading of Marcus Aurelius and other classical authors, but the right solution is reached.

While this may seem like a relatively bland review for a novel, by this stage with Donna Leon it really is a case that the reader knows what they're getting. Sparkling dialogue with sharp observations of Italian - and specifically Venetian - society abounds, as does a plot which, while not desperately intricate, takes the reader sufficiently far into the dark underbelly of one of the world's top tourist attractions as to make the place seem just that little more interesting.

Four stars.