- Paperback: 303 pages
- Publisher: Arrow Books; New edition edition (2 Mar 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099269309
- ISBN-13: 978-0099269304
- Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 2 x 17.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 90,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Fatal Remedies
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Amazon.co.uk Review
In this eighth Donna Leon police procedural set in Venice, honest cop Brunetti finds himself, for once, bending the rules severely. His wife, Paola, has been arrested for vandalism and malicious damage. She has, of course, acted out of the highest of motives--the tourist agency whose windows she smashed specialises in trips for unaccompanied men to the Far East. But just how far is it legitimate to go when faced with something like sex tourism? And how can Brunetti pursue justice with his wife taking the law into her own hands?
This has all of Leon's regular cast of characters--Brunetti's indolent and corrupt superior Patta, only too pleased to use his zealous commissario as a scapegoat, and Paola's somewhat sinister father, Count Falier, one of the men who, for good and ill, run the city of Venice. As always, the plot switchbacks from crime to crime and issue to issue. Leon's endlessly superior capacity for leading her readers up a variety of garden paths has rarely been so clearly on display. Above all, it shows what has been one of the more attractive marriages in modern detective fiction under serious stress for the first time; these have always been detective stories that offered more rewards than those of crime and punishment and this one is no exception.--Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Sunday Times
‘...one of the most engaging of fictional detectives....Brunetti is...back on track, sadder perhaps, but wiser and wittier than ever.’
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
RX for a murder,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fatal Remedies (Hardcover)
Donna Leon's eighth novel in her Commissario Guido Brunetti series is another crown of glory for this American writer. In "Fatal Remedies," Leon, ever the one to keep her readers' absolute attention riveted to all details, continues her intriguing mise en scene mysteries with sharp focus, clarity of detail, and powerful character observations. This book is well worth the wait. Leon begins with a new twist: Brunetti's wife Paola has been arrested for smashing the window of a travel agency which she knows arranges sex-tours to third-world countries where Westerners exploit, especially, the child-for-sex trade. This is an issue which Paola finds she cannot permit to go unnoticed, having two children of her own. Like Antigone, her sense of moral outrage at an issue the state does nothing about extends to the point where she takes the law into her own hands. Through her personal crusade, she hopes to call attention to this social canker and, with public outrage she hopes to generate this evil will be halted. She believes that she is prepared to take the consequences for her own actions. It is not so simple, she finds out. Unfortunately, she discovers that her own crusade has negative ramifications for her family and that instead of halting one injustice, she appears to be compounding another by hurting the ones she loves....Brunetti is called back to work and the chase begins. Brunetti, whose passion for truth, justice, equality, and respect for his beloved Venice, finds himself once again forced to confront moral and legal dilemmas. Leon is at her best and "Fatal Remedies" doesn't miss a beat as the pace picks up, page by page...Leon is not one to dodge social and contemporary issues, as her readers well know from previous books. Her views on environmental destruction (and how the Italian government and its citizens view the subject), social and political corruption, and such social issues as sex-tourism and the importation of former East Bloc citizens to work the local prostitution trade are readily identified. And the author is not timid in her criticism. It's not that she is indicting Italy and the Italians, but that these ills seem to be pervasive. Leon, an American, lives in Italy and knows the Italians well, but she has lived in other countries (and currently teaches at an American university at the Vicenza U.S. Army post) and is well versed on contemporary issues. And she loves Venice. Each of her novels tenders her feelings for the Most Serene Republic and readers cannot escape without feeling the life, the very essence of Venice, and her knowledge of that city's history and its ethnic origins make her books ring with a resonance that is real yet we know her story is "only a novel." In "Fatal Remedies," Leon counts on her readers to assume much (in fact, a first-time reader may be confused by references that are clear only from having read earlier works), which is a shortcoming of individual works in such series; however, as "a part of the whole" this book works well and contains all the ingredients Leon has so successfully concocted in the past. The publisher tells us that she is currently working on a ninth installment. Shall we count the days?
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent, but nothing Great,
By
This review is from: Fatal Remedies (Paperback)
This is the first of Leon's books I've read, although it is apparently the eighth in her police procedural series set in Venice and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. It starts off with a nice twist, with the Commissario's university professor wife deliberately breaking the display window of a travel agency she believes profits from sex tours to southeast Asia. Hers arrest and subsequent repetition of the vandalism/protest obviously creates a number of problems for the Commissario. Professionally he is placed on administrative leave, and at home husband and wife must face differing beliefs in the relationships between morality, law and justice.Then everything gets a whole lot more complicated when the nominal owner of the travel agency is found murdered. For reasons that aren't ever properly explained, the Commissario is assigned to lead the investigation despite the obvious conflict of interest. Non-Italian readers may just have to chalk it up as another Italian idiosyncrasy. That's actually one of the pleasures of the book-the way Leon subtly incorporates Italian culture throughout the story. Examples include the constant ducking into bars and cafes for drinks and snacks, highly flexible work hours, lengthy lunches at home, and the offhand banality of tax fraud. To fill out the Commissario's portfolio, there is a subplot involving the witness to a bank robbery and possible Mafia intimidation. The result is a credible, if not exactly dense, procedural built on several social concerns. One flaw is that one never really gets much of a sense of Venice from the book, it felt like it could have been any Italian city. The other flaw is the Commissario's repeated reliance on a uber-hacker secretary who provides him with all manner of data. She's a wholly believable character with unbelievable skills who's far faster and better than any real-life hacker. Those minor complaints aside, it's a diverting read, albeit unlikely to have me scrambling to track down the previous seven in the series.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Slightly pedestrian addition to the Brunetti canon,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fatal Remedies (Hardcover)
Fatal Remedies begins with staid, intellectual Paola Brunetti hurling a rock through the window of a travel agency active in providing sex-tours to underdeveloped countries. Brunetti is incensed: he is worried as to the potential consequences to them both but also because the idea that laws can be set aside for reasons of personal morality strikes directly at his vision of the individual's position in society.When the owner of the Travel Agency - and of much else - is murdered Brunetti is appointed to find the killer; Paola is horrified to think her example may have encouraged another to kill. As always in Donna Leon's work there is a sense of moral relativism: one sub-plot involves the death of the wife of a witness to a bank robbery. Was she the victim of a Mafia 'hit' designed to silence ther husband or did he take advantage of the situation to kill her himself and blame it on the Mafia? No definitive answer is tendered. As always also, the Italian view of life is central to the fabric of the book: Donna Leon's wry observation that *any* act is to be excusable if it is claimed that it is performed in the name of tax avoidance is coupled with the frank incredulity of all concerned when they encounter an *honest lawyer* who *doesn't* cheat on his taxes. All of the above is good and is what we have come to expect from Donna Leon. What is less good is the pacing: Vice Questore Patta's decision first to place Brunetti on 'Administrative Leave' for his connection to the defaulting Paola is understandable; his almost immediate volte face and appointment of Brunetti to the murder is less so and is never fully explained. The eventual explanation of the crime itself seems almost tacked-on at the end of the book rather than growing naturally from what has come before. Again, and this is a persistant irritant in Donna Leon's books, is the input of the deus ex machina, Signorina Eletra. She is never adequately described, nor, to anyone at all familiar with computers, is her perennial and apparently effortless hacking of computers to provide cruciual information, believable. Even the wizard hackers of popular myth and fable have a lower batting average than she, nor can they *reliably* deliver on schedule. All said, this is not Donna Leon's best work, but even so it stands head and shoulders above much else of the genre. I look forward to each new book in the series and read them immediately on appearance. I did so with Fatal Remedies; I will do so with her next which, we are told, is nearling completion. Worth reading even in hardback.
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