Mystery/Audio Book
Fatal Remedies is the 8th book in the Commissario Guido
Burnetti series but the first one I have seen. Fatal Remedies does a very good job of standing alone. Until I finished listening and looked
Fatal Remedies up on Goodreads I had no idea there were so many previous books
and when I went to the author’s web site I found that there are now 21 books in
the series. Now that I know I will
be looking for some of the previous books and my poor TBR pile will continue to
grow.
The characters in this series are great. Burnetti’s boss
Vice-questore Patta is incompetent at best. Sergente Vianello is a great sidekick. For me one of the best characters in
the books was Signorina Elettra, Patta’s secretary. She is the glue that holds everything together. A whiz at the computer she can find
whatever information Burnetti needs. She
outmaneuvers Patta and does what ever she wants. Paola, Burnetti's wife also play a significant part in the book.
The mystery arrives in several layers and kept my attention
throughout the book. It looked for
awhile like the bad guy was going to get away with murder but that did not
happen. I loved the way Burnetti
finally found a solution.
For me one of the best parts of the book was the way
everything Venetian was included in the book. I wanted to go visit after reading the book and saw on the
author’s web site that there are walking tours of Burnetti’s Venice.
Donna Leon has lived in Venice for over 25 years and in Fatal Remedies she
makes the city come alive.
Here is the Goodreads summary:
In this eighth Donna
Leon police procedural set in Venice, honest cop Brunetti finds himself, for
once, bending the rules severely. His wife, Paola, has been arrested for
vandalism and malicious damage. She has, of course, acted out of the highest of
motives--the tourist agency whose windows she smashed specialises in trips for
unaccompanied men to the Far East. But just how far is it legitimate to go when
faced with something like sex tourism? And how can Brunetti pursue justice with
his wife taking the law into her own hands?
This has all of Leon's regular cast of
characters--Brunetti's indolent and corrupt superior Patta, only too pleased to
use his zealous commissario as a scapegoat, and Paola's somewhat sinister
father, Count Falier, one of the men who, for good and ill, run the city of
Venice. As always, the plot switchbacks from crime to crime and issue to issue.
Leon's endlessly superior capacity for leading her readers up a variety of
garden paths has rarely been so clearly on display. Above all, it shows what
has been one of the more attractive marriages in modern detective fiction under
serious stress for the first time; these have always been detective stories
that offered more rewards than those of crime and punishment and this one is no
exception.
Sound Library produced the audio book
of Fatal Remedies by Donna Leon in 2012.
David Colacci was the narrator of Fatal Remedies.
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