Blood from a Stone

January 1, 2005
This installment in the re-launched international crime series has the Commissario delving into Venice's community of illegal immigrants, counterfeiting, and murder. CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction-winner Leon lives in Venice. A 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2005
The appeal of Guido Brunetti, the hero of Donna Leon's long-running Venetian crime series, comes not from his shrewdness, though he is plenty shrewd, nor from his quick wit. It comes, instead, from his role as an everyman. He is trapped in an impenetrable bureaucracy; his bosses are either foolish or corrupt; he lacks the power to catch the bad guys or to bring about justice. He is a cop, but his workaday world feels much like yours and mine. So it is here, as he attempts to investigate the peculiar murder of an illegal immigrant, a " vu cumbra." The victim, a Senegalese street vendor, is shot, assassination style, as he peddles fake handbags to tourists. The murder brings out the latent racism of the locals, and as Brunetti attempts to come to terms with his own feelings about the immigrants, he realizes that the crime is only the tip of an iceberg that he will never be allowed to explore. He soldiers on, though, solving nothing, but doing good around the edges and making some sense of his feelings and those of his wife and children, also struggling with a new world in which the old assumptions no longer hold. Not so different from our own days at the office or nights around the dinner table. Crime fiction for those willing to grapple with, rather than escape, the uncertainties of daily life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)