Give Unto Others: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

Give Unto Others: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery (The Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries #31) by Donna Leon

What role can or should loyalty play in the life of a police inspector? It’s a question Commissario Guido Brunetti must face and ultimately answer in Give Unto Others, Donna Leon’s splendid 31st installment of her acclaimed Venetian crime series.

Brunetti is approached for a favor by Elisabetta Foscarini, a woman he knows casually, but her mother was good to Brunetti’s mother, so he feels obliged to at least look into the matter privately, and not as official police business. Foscarini’s son-in-law, Enrico Fenzo, has alarmed his wife (her daughter) by confessing their family might be in danger because of something he’s involved with. Since Fenzo is an accountant, Brunetti logically suspects the cause of danger is related to the finances of a client. Yet his clients seem benign: an optician, a restaurateur, a charity established by his father-in-law. However, when his friend’s daughter’s place of work is vandalized, Brunetti asks his own favors—that his colleagues Claudia Griffoni, Lorenzo Vianello, and Signorina Elettra Zorzi assist his private investigation, which soon enough turns official as they uncover the dark and Janus-faced nature of a venerable Italian institution.

Exploring the wobbly line between the criminal and non-criminal, revealing previously untold elements of Brunetti’s past, Give Unto Others shows that the price of reciprocity can be steep.

Reviews:

"Unarguably one of the most humane--and absorbing--of the series . . . The dilemmas demand the best of Brunetti, which is what he delivers."-- Toronto Star

"The true victim of the crime at the center of this book is trust--in those we love and in ourselves as well . . . Even as an entry in such an idiosyncratic (and appealing) series, this case is one of the most personal our protagonist - a thoughtful, compassionate man - has faced. Fraud, and the lax Italian laws that accommodate it, may be at the center of this narrative, but the issues at its heart are human rather than legal: loss, aging, and the ways in which time plays on our character, for good or ill."-- Arts Fuse

"Once again, Brunetti's remarkable empathy with people takes him into shark-infested waters, forced to confront how 'revenge, that deformed child of justice, fed itself with blind desire.' Another moving meditation on the vagaries of human relationships posing as a mystery novel. There is no ambiguity about the unalloyed affection millions of readers feel toward Guido Brunetti, one of crime fiction's most popular protagonists."--Booklist (starred review)

Dimensions: 1.2" H x 9.2" L x 6.0" W (1.05 lbs) 295 pages. Hardcover.