Donna Leon - Doctored Evidence (2004)
Last year, the publication of U.S. ex-pat Donna Leon's Uniform Justice -- about a murder in an Italian military academy -- marked her much-lauded return to the American market after 7 years. (They ceased to be published originally as she believed the way her publishers were marketing her books was "vulgar.") The rest of the world over, she has been a regular feature on the bestseller lists, and determined American fans have only been able to acquire foreign copies. Thankfully, that is now slowly changing. Why thankfully? Because the Commissario Guido Brunetti series, set in her adopted home-city of Venice, is one of the most enjoyable currently being produced. It is a huge big sparkling gem in the crown of crime fiction, a treasure trove of enjoyment.
Doctored Evidence is the 13th in the award-winning series, and just as good as all the rest. An unpleasant elderly woman is found murdered in her apartment by her doctor. She was not liked. Treating her maids no better than slaves, and keeping her television on loud almost every night are just two of the behaviors which alienate her from her neighbors. Suspicion immediately falls on her Romanian maid, who has fled, heading back to her country. As the police catch up with her at a train station on the border, she flees in desperation, and is killed as she runs across the tracks into the path of a train.
Finding a large amount of money on her person, they believe they've found their woman. That is, until one of the victim's neighbors returns from a business trip in London with strong evidence to suggest that she was not the killer. The investigating officer dismisses her, passing her off to Brunetti, who starts to investigate the case unofficially, and uncovers a mystery far more complex than the one they all suspected.
The fact that Leon writes these novels purely for pleasure (she has said that she would far rather attend the opera if it came to a choice) and not for fame or money (uncomfortable with any kind of "celebrity," she refuses to allow them to be published in Italy), really shines through this marvelous series. It is infused with something wonderful. This is crime fiction for the sake of it. It is pure and it is wonderful.
That's not to say it isn't serious, either, because it is. Donna Leon does for Venice what Ruth Rendell does for Britain and Michael Connelly for L.A. Like many great crime writers, Leon uses her fiction as a way of highlighting things about the world -- in this case specifically Venice -- which concern her. Indeed, often they expose a level of corruption which Signor Berlusconi would not be at all pleased about! Doctored Evidence focuses perhaps less on general civic corruption -- although Leon can't resist throwing hints of it into the mix -- and more on a kind of personal corruption, while still managing to write as piercingly and fascinatingly about the society and people of Venice as ever. She is in the fortunate position of an outsider able to look at a society from the inside, and she utilizes that advantage brilliantly for her portrait of the city.
These novels are practically drenched in culture, and their protagonist is wonderfully refreshing: he is not hard or gritty, nor particularly flawed or jaded; he is just a normal Italian, a very moral man who wrestles every day with justice and its ambiguities. Plus, his wife is wonderful! The plots are refreshing, too, in the way of much European fiction: they are much less formulaic than some American or British crime fiction, as they have less heritage of it. They are riveting and yet they move as languidly as the gondolas that ferry tourists around the canals of the city. Leon's mysteries are predictable only in their excellence. Doctored Evidence is a wonderful novel, a pure, sublime joy that no reader should allow to pass by.
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