If you have never been to Venice, this book will take you there. If you have, it will take you back. The setting adds attractive interst to a clever fast-moving thriller that includes just the right amount of detail to grab your interest whilst not being too tedious. Written in the third person, Commissario Guido Brunetti is our engaging non-heroic Italian sleuth, making a refreshing change from many of his contemporaries. His detective skills are reminiscent of a modern-day Hercule Poirot. Lovers of Agatha Christie will enjoy the comfortingly observant style of Donna Leon. She describes people and places, and sometimes food and wine, so that they live well throughout the book. The crime that Brunetti investigates is interesting with some nice twists that hold your interest right the way to the last page. I like this book because of its beautiful balance between good and bad, it attention to detail and sense of realism. Having only just discovered this author it seems a shame that many of her books are out of print.

This is the first of Leon's books I've read, although it is apparently the eighth in her police procedural series set in Venice and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. It starts off with a nice twist, with the Commissario's university professor wife deliberately breaking the display window of a travel agency she believes profits from sex tours to southeast Asia. Hers arrest and subsequent repetition of the vandalism/protest obviously creates a number of problems for the Commissario. Professionally he is placed on administrative leave, and at home husband and wife must face differing beliefs in the relationships between morality, law and justice.

Then everything gets a whole lot more complicated when the nominal owner of the travel agency is found murdered. For reasons that aren't ever properly explained, the Commissario is assigned to lead the investigation despite the obvious conflict of interest. Non-Italian readers may just have to chalk it up as another Italian idiosyncrasy. That's actually one of the pleasures of the book-the way Leon subtly incorporates Italian culture throughout the story. Examples include the constant ducking into bars and cafes for drinks and snacks, highly flexible work hours, lengthy lunches at home, and the offhand banality of tax fraud. To fill out the Commissario's portfolio, there is a subplot involving the witness to a bank robbery and possible Mafia intimidation.

The result is a credible, if not exactly dense, procedural built on several social concerns. One flaw is that one never really gets much of a sense of Venice from the book, it felt like it could have been any Italian city. The other flaw is the Commissario's repeated reliance on a uber-hacker secretary who provides him with all manner of data. She's a wholly believable character with unbelievable skills who's far faster and better than any real-life hacker. Those minor complaints aside, it's a diverting read, albeit unlikely to have me scrambling to track down the previous seven in the series.