Venice is still in good hands – with Detective Guido Brunetti and his team – The American Spectator | US News & PoliticsThe American Spectator

The Refinery Fire: A Mystery of Commissario Guido Brunetti (The Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries, 33)

By Donna Leon

(Atlantic Monthly Press, 288 pages, $22.00)

Donna Leons 33^rd episode of her hugely popular Commissario (detective inspector) Guido Brunetti series shows that at 82, she’s still got a literary fastball. And that she knows how to keep the show’s characters fresh and alive.

With her skilled and literary creation, Guido, Leon enchants, amuses, and sometimes gives us a glimpse into that vanity fair that is the human enterprise, as good literature has always done. She is one of a handful of writers in the crime/mystery/detective section of the bookstore who are much more than just genre writers offering a few hours of distraction from the daily frustrations of real life. (READ MORE from Larry Thornberry: The Memoirs of a Mysterious Author Are Fittingly Mysterious)

Guido’s territory is Venice. This would be Italy, not Florida. Gondolas, not golf carts. A water world that Leon, a native of New Jersey, loved so much when she first arrived that she made it her home for 30 years. She knows Venice. And she has brought this unique city and those who sail in it to life for millions of readers, starting with Guido’s first case, in 1992 Death at La Fenice. All of Brunetti’s novels are still in print.

A few years ago, mainly in search of anonymity and to escape the pollution and tourist flow of Venice, Leon moved to a small village in Switzerland. This must have given her a serious case of cultural whiplash, exchanging the loose Italy for the super-orderly Switzerland.

Most adults realize that all large organizations—including police and military—are self-protective bureaucracies. Those in high positions in these organizations are at least as concerned, often far more concerned, with the organization’s public image and its effect on next year’s budget than with its stated mission.

Leon investigates this truth in The fire of a refinery. Guido’s police station in Venice is no exception to this melancholy truth. And neither is the Carabinieri, a mix of police and military that probably has no use outside Italy. The dirty ass-covering by these two stations enables a dirty and violent criminal enterprise that Guido, with his colleagues Commissario Claudia Griffoni and the team’s researcher and computer genius unparalleled, Signorino Elettra must sort things out, at great risk to his career and person.

It all begins in the early hours of a spring morning, when two gangs of youngsters start a non-lethal but noisy brawl in public. Pushing, shoving, name-calling, small fistfights and lots of male display and posing. Gloomy stuff. The police put a stop to it, arrest the mini-gladiators, who are promptly released to their parents. Except for a 16-year-old boy, a certain Orlando Monforte, who says he is afraid to tell his father (and he is right). So Griffoni volunteers to escort him home. This act of kindness does not go unpunished.

Shortly after this unremarkable event, a cheesy lawyer with a history of even cheesier clients and tactics shows up at Guido’s office. He claims to be representing a client who makes the absurd claim that Griffoni, a beautiful woman who had her pick of adult men, had made sexual advances on young Orlando. This turns out to be a mind flayer to distract the police from a criminal enterprise headed by Orlando’s father, Dario, and from a case of fabricated courage.

Dario Monforte was known in Italy as a hero. For his own consumption, he had risked his own life to save comrades during a bombing raid on the Italian compound in Iraq. The truth of his actions that night, and the weeks before, were far less noble than this official version, and the incompetence of the Carabinieri would have been embarrassing if it had been revealed. Hence the false hero, whose behavior does not improve when he returns to Italy. (READ MORE: The Road Well Traveled: Exploring the History of Literary Travel)

The plot in Refinery is complex, suspenseful, well-timed and believable. Guido and his team solve the sad case and bring it to a literally fiery conclusion. But while the plot is quite satisfying and keeps readers in suspense until the end, this story, like all of Leon’s work, is character-driven. The rich, always entertaining and finely drawn characters are Guido, his wife Paola and Griffoni, who we learn more about in this episode.

If I have one small gripe with Leon, it is that I hope she uses fewer Italian words and phrases in her stories or adds a glossary. Some of these words and phrases are difficult to determine, even from context, whether they are names of people, places, organizations, or foods. But this has not been too much of a hindrance to my reading pleasure. It probably has not hindered many others either.

For those who are as addicted to detective fiction as I am, but haven’t heard of Donna Leon’s work, I recommend adding her to the list of writers to turn to when you’re indulging your addiction. Longtime fans of Leon’s work, myself included, are looking forward to Guido #34.