Beastly Things

February 20, 2012
In bestseller Leon’s complex, contemplative 21st Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery (after 2011’s Drawing Conclusions), the Venetian police inspector must identify a man found stabbed to death and floating in a canal. Unusually, the victim suffered from a rare disease that disfigures the body and is linked to alcoholism, though the pathologist determines he wasn’t a drinker. Brunetti soon discovers that the man was a veterinarian, Andrea Nava, who also worked part-time at a slaughterhouse inspecting the health of the animals brought in by the local farmers. Despite his recent separation from his wife after a tryst with a co-worker, Nava appears to have been a compassionate human being. But when Brunetti visits the slaughterhouse and begins to examine how it operates, the inspector comes to some unsettling conclusions about the murdered man, the motive, and his own life. Leon deftly blends police procedural with philosophy and existential speculation. Her intimate descriptions of Venice, where she has lived for 30 years, lend color.

March 1, 2012
The death of an inoffensive veterinarian takes Commissario Guido Brunetti once more into the heart of the human beast. Even after the victim is identified--and it's a good long time before he is--the name of Dottor Andrea Nava's killer seems less mysterious than the question of why someone, anyone, would have stabbed him in the back three times and dumped his body into a Venetian canal. Although he's estranged from his wife, Anna Doni, she faints from either grief or guilt when Brunetti and his friend, Inspector Lorenzo Vianello, break the news to her. Clara Baroni, his assistant at the Clinica Amico Mio veterinary practice, can shed no light on his death. And although his sad little dalliance with Giulia Borelli, Director Alessandro Papetti's assistant at the slaughterhouse where he moonlighted part time, may have threatened his marriage, it hardly seems a weighty enough motive for murder. It's not until after a tour of the slaughterhouse brings Brunetti and Vianello up against the horrid realities behind the meat they placidly consume every day that Brunetti realizes that carcasses aren't the most bestial presences lurking there. Brunetti, who airily tells his wife Paola, "I don't do ethical," spends less time than usual (Drawing Conclusions, 2011, etc.) butting heads with his nemesis, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta. But his conspiratorial dealings with his omni-competent assistant Signora Elettra and his suave attempts at acting dumb while he's questioning his few suspects are equally rewarding.

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Starred review from February 15, 2012
Throughout the 21 novels in her much-loved Guido Brunetti series, Leon has tackled various social issues, from human trafficking through immigration policy and sexual abuse, always with great sensitivity toward not only the criminal aspects of the issue but also the more ambiguous toll that societal malfunction takes on individual human lives. So it is again in this wrenching tale of the murder of a quiet veterinarian, the victim of a tragedy of almost classical dimensions. One painfully human mistake, a simple act of hubris, draws an ordinary man into an inescapable trap that leaves him dead in a Venetian canal, carrying no identification and wearing only one shoe. Gradually, Commissario Brunetti and his colleague Inspector Vianello follow the trail to the town of Mestre, on the mainland near Venice, and to a slaughterhouse, where the animals that provide the meat which adorns the plates of the finest Venetian restaurants (and Brunetti's own table) are killed and dressed in the most barbaric manner imaginable. No matter her topic, Leon always keeps her thumb off the moral scale, never suggesting that simple social reform, however necessary (and however difficult to achieve), can eradicate the human tragedies into which we fall so easily and so irrevocably. But despite that powerfully evoked sense of calamitous inevitability, she leaves us here with a small but moving moment of hope, a sense that acts of kindness, from both humans and animals, are our only salvation. A seemingly straightforward mystery written with such delicacy and emotional force that we can't help but be reminded of Greek tragedy. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Leon's Brunetti series has sold more than one million copies in North America, and she is a particular favorite among librarians and library patrons.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)