Donna Leon - Blood from A Stone (2005)
Reviewed by Fiona Walker
One sleepy evening in the Campo Santo Stefano, a vu Cumpra, an immigrant street-dealer, is gunned down as he sells his wares to a group of American tourists. The case quickly becomes one of Commissario Guido Brunetti’s most mystifying: why on earth would anyone want to kill a vu Cumpra?
What motive could anyone possibly have to shoot a harmless street vendor who keeps only to his own community, and whom everyone else in the city of Venice largely ignores? Especially given that the organized, efficient nature of the killing hints at something like a professional hit, which would be even more incomprehensible. To make even less sense of the puzzle, Brunetti begins to see hints that Rome’s Ministry of the Interior are sniffing around the case.
If this isn’t quite Leon’s best (then, it would be incredibly hard for her to better Uniform Justice), it is certainly everything a fan would expect, certainly a novel up to the standard she has set herself and the series. If you’ve tried and liked her before, you’ll like this also. Brunetti remains as brilliant as ever as the intelligent, cultured Venetian police-officer, and there’s as much warm and wonderful family background as ever, also.
Blood from A Stone is almost certainly Leon’s most topical, timely book, with its issues of immigration and invisible outsiders, and anyone who has admired the rich social conscience of her previous work will not find any lessening here. Her crime novels are partly so enjoyable because while they do not try to take themselves too seriously as crime novels, as social novels they are deeply, unfailingly serious.
At times they are very angry, and you get a beautiful sense of the love Leon has for her beautiful city, and the hate she has for the corrupt political forces that mean that, even if every inhabitant is born equal, they’ll soon find their right place depending on how many favors they (or their family) are owed or can give, how much money they have to oil the frictious wheels.
Leon is a very curious writer in that crime-fiction is just a hobby, to finance her first love - opera. You'd think that she might take, therefore, a slightly cavalier attitude toward it, but not at all. More so than many other exponents of this type of novel who take the form more seriously, she refuses to be bound by convention. She is, oddly, an innovator. She takes chances and turns things on their head and doesn't like to adhere to "rules", even if it means breaking some of the strictest guidelines of crime fiction (as she did so wonderfully in her first novel).
The miracle is that she is able to break these guidelines incredibly successfully, and her mysteries are still satisfying. The ending here has aspects of the “figure bits of it out for yourself” school, which I always find oddly pleasing. Anyone who dislikes endings that remain in part ambiguous, slightly open-ended, should probably steer clear of this particular novel, but for those who are impressed by realistic portraits of justice and its entanglements, you can do no better than reach for one of Leon’s novels.
Posted by Fiona Walker in Book Reviews | Permalink
