Drawing Conclusions
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Book Description
The new novel from Donna Leon, the Sunday Times bestselling author of A Question of Belief
Product Description
When a young woman returns from holiday to find her elderly neighbour dead, she immediately alerts the police. Commissario Brunetti is called to the scene but, though there are signs of a struggle, it seems the woman has simply suffered a fatal heart attack. Vice-Questore Patta is eager to dismiss the case as a death from natural causes, but Brunetti believes there is more to it than that. His suspicions are further aroused when the medical examiner finds faint bruising around the victim's neck and shoulders, indicating that someone might have grabbed and shaken her. Could this have caused her heart attack? Was someone threatening her?
Conversations with the woman's son, her upstairs neighbour, and the nun in charge of the old-age home where she volunteered, do little to satisfy Brunetti's nagging curiosity. With the help of Inspector Vianello and the ever-resourceful Signorina Elettra, Brunetti is determined to get to the truth and find some measure of justice.
Insightful and emotionally powerful, Drawing Conclusions reaffirms Donna Leon's status as one of the masters of literary crime fiction.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
56 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not one of her best, I'm sorry to say ...,
By
This review is from: Drawing Conclusions (Hardcover)
I begin to wonder whether Donna Leon has exhausted her interest in Brunetti and the world she has created for him. I almost felt at points in the book that she was simply rushing through to get the book out to schedule. Like a previous reviewer I felt the nods to Brunetti's world almost perfunctory: Elletra, Vianello, Paola and the children all make their due appearances doing something characteristic, but they do not develop at all as personalities (which is a sadness for all long term readers, and I felt particularly an opportunity missed with Chiara and Rafi - I mean really, isn't there always something new with teenagers?). Personally I missed most the descriptions of Paola's cooking - I always linger over the pages which describe her dishing up, and them enjoying her beautiful seasonal recipes - this time a couple of lines tell us what the family has, and you can go away and look it up in a cookbook if you want more. Mean, I call it!But to the detective aspect of the book, which is what we are all theoretically there for - how about that? Well, agaiin I felt that Donna Leon was slightly bored by the format. Yes, we get a mystery - an elderly lady is found dead. It could be a heart attack but there are some indications which suggest violence which may have precipitated the heart attack. The son is well in with Patta, but behaves mysteriously, the finder of the body may have links to the Mafia, the spare bedroom of the flat is plain odd. We get a resolution, of course, but it is frankly not very satisfactory qua detective fiction resolution - and the red herrings are not enjoyably played out along the way - just floated and dropped. Where Leon seems more to be going is a slightly downbeat state of the nation review. Her disenchatment with Italy's political system is often seen in the books, but there seems to be a more overarching feeling of depression with the malaise underpinning the book. She looks at the way that corruption is endemic even amongst the good guys - how does Elletra get those armfuls of flowers past accounts, how many laws does Brunetti ask her to break when he gets her to do some hackery on the side of the angels, how much impact does a gift of champagne have on a degree result? And she also asks: are we wrong to see truth as a good - is it not in some cases awful and best not spoken - for our own sakes and for others? And how do we best protect and preserve the only things which really matter? The questions are interesting and the situations created to pose them are well drawn - but again they are not as fully developed as I would have liked. So for the first time ever, I put down my new Donna Leon with a sense of disappointment. Of course I will buy the next one, but with lower expectations - and with a hope that in the intervening year she has decided to commit herself fully to the book in one direction or another.
41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Brunetti's getting tired,
By
This review is from: Drawing Conclusions (Hardcover)
I've always been such a fan of the Commissario Brunetti series that when this book arrived (pre ordered last year) I cancelled all other plans & retreated to the sofa. Bad idea. There's a body. There's an investigation. Less than 3 hours after finishing the last page, I can't even remember if the theoretically guilty party gets charged with anything at all.It's almost like Ms Leon has lost interest - Scarpa makes a token appearance, complaining about the 2 coppers Brunetti has no time for; Elettra buys flowers and hacks into computers; Vianello is a tower of strength; Patta is as blandly infuriating as ever; Paola cooks less than formerly and Raffi & Chiara barely make an appearance. It's Brunetti, Jim, but not as we know it. Perhaps I've finally read too many of a series which I adored for its freshness and personality when it first appeared, but frankly, I could not get really interested in any of the characters at all. I just didn't care. I don't think Donna Leon does, anymore.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Leon, but not obviously...,
By
This review is from: Drawing Conclusions (Hardcover)
An old woman is found dead; it appears to be natural causes - a heart attack; except there are a few marks on the corpse which aren't absolutely consonant with that verdict. Brunetti can't ignore them, and is led into an investigation which leads to a dreadful evil behind the death.If you want thrills and fast action, look elsewhere. To do that, though, would be a shame, because the way Leon tells the story exactly parallels the nature of the crime and the evil: they're hidden things, things society would sooner ignore, things which require careful vision to see. So the investigation unfolds gently, slowly and not always obviously; yet always inexorably, until we are brought, with Brunetti, to the truth, and the central evil of the book. It would be a shame if a writer of Donna Leon's class were condemned to write variations on a theme, as so many crime writers do. Each of her books has a different register; she is ready to try new ways of writing and unfolding a plot. And that means, inevitably, that not every one of her fans will like each book. Yet, to me at least, this one is a gem: understated but vital, and never after effect for the sake of effect. So what if Patta et al take a back seat? That's what this story requires, so that's how Leon writes it. Ignore the nay-sayers and see for yourself...
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