SO SHALL YOU REAP

So Shall You Reap is the thirty-second book in the Commissario Brunetti series by award-winning American-born author, Donna Leon. Another visit to Guido Brunetti's Venice, and it's a good one! While there are plenty of day-to-day tasks and issues keeping Commissario Guido Brunetti busy, it's the vicious stabbing murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan servant that draws his attention from them.

What is unsettling is that Guido spoke to the man only the day before his death, while trying to do his father-in-law a favour. Those who know Inesh Kavinda well pronounce him a good, kind man, so Guido is puzzled to find "the books he'd seen on the shelves: they were morally at odds with the man described to him" on topics like the Tamil Tigers and the Italian terrorists of the 1980s.

Guido patiently talks to the man's employer and the neighbours, but he is still mystified as to why someone would want to kill him. By the time Guido has gathered a number of apparently-unrelated names that he feels are somehow connected to the murder, Signorina Elettra Zorzi has returned from a cybersecurity conference with a handy website address that may just help to tie it all together.

Against a background of a Sardinian pecorino tasting, a respected colleague's imminent retirement, a call from Genova about a Venetian stalker, the relocation of a walnut door and frame at the Questura, baby gangs progressing from looting and vandalism to violence on the vulnerable, the tedium of personnel assessments, and an art thief taking a different career direction, the true facts of the mystery gradually unfold.

As well, a certain incident in Treviso causes Guido and Lorenzo realise how little they know about the personal lives of those they work with every day; Guido narrowly escapes a cobra-like attack from Paola about sensitivity; and he wishes for a Roman augur to help him deal with Vice-Questore Patta. One thing that will endear Guido to the reader is his ready acceptance that he does not know it all, that others might know better: he is willing to learn and seems utterly devoid of arrogance.

Leon's descriptive prose is delightful: "Bocchese was at his desk, along with the detritus of days, if not years. Papers, reports, surveys, drawings lay across his desk like leaves in October. There was no order, no plan, only apparent chaos, anti-design, mess. Yet Bocchese, by some system he nursed in his bosom and revealed to no one, could find in that clutter, with the accuracy of a heron spearing a fish, any paper requested of him." Leon manages to convey her setting with consummate ease. This is another excellent dose of Italian crime fiction.

This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Grove Atlantic