A review by margaret21
Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon

4.0

Sometimes what you want from a book is to spend time with old friends. I love Guido Brunetti, I love his wife Paola and their children and like to catch up with them over their delicious family meals in their Venetian apartment. And I enjoy the plots of all the Commissario Brunetti books too. This is however, quite a dark tale (murders always are, of course), with its suggestion that corruption in Italy as elsewhere, is endemic and underwrites everyday life. Here is a death in canal. Is it simply a robbery gone wrong, or something more sinister? Brunetti has his work cut out to establish that this death, like the two that follow, is indeed the result of corruption at the highest level. There is no happy ending in a situation like this.... or indeed any real conclusion to such a story