Donna Leon - Drawing Conclusions (Commissario Brunetti 20)

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 victims 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 womans son, her upstairs neighbour, and the nun in charge of the old-age home where she volunteered, do little to satisfy Brunettis 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 Leons status as one of the masters of literary crime fiction.

Donna Leon has lived in Venice for thirty years and previously lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China, where she worked as a teacher. Her previous novels featuring Commissario Brunetti have all been highly acclaimed, including Friends in High Places, which won the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, Through a Glass, Darkly, Suffer the Little Children, The Girl of His Dreams and, most recently, A Question of Belief.

Also by Donna Leon

Death at La Fenice

Death in a Strange Country

The Anonymous Venetian

A Venetian Reckoning

Acqua Alta

The Death of Faith

A Noble Radiance

Fatal Remedies

Friends in High Places

A Sea of Troubles

Wilful Behaviour

Uniform Justice

Doctored Evidence

Blood from a Stone

Through a Glass, Darkly

Suffer the Little Children

The Girl of His Dreams

About Face

A Question of Belief

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In the name of God Amen. I George Frederick Handel considering the uncertainties of human life doe make this my will in manner following

Because she had worked for decades as a translator of fiction and non-fiction from English and German to Italian, Anna Maria Giusti was familiar with a wide range of subjects. Her most recent translation had been an American self-help book about how to deal with conflicting emotions. Though the superficial idiocies she had encountered which had always sounded sillier when she put them into Italian had occasionally reduced her to giggles, some of the text returned to her now, as she climbed the stairs to her apartment.

It is possible to feel two conflicting emotions about the same person at the same time. So it had proven with her feelings towards her lover, whose family she had just returned from visiting in Palermo. Even people we know well can surprise us when they are placed in different surroundings. Different seemed an inadequate word to describe Palermo and what she had found there. Alien, exotic, foreign: not even these words did justice to what she had experienced, yet how to explain it? Did they not all carry telefonini? Was not everyone she met exquisitely well dressed and equally well mannered? Nor was it a question of language, for they all spoke an Italian more elegant than anything she heard from her Veneto-cadenced family and friends. Nor financial, for the wealth of Nicos family was on view at every turn.

She had gone to Palermo in order to meet his family, believing he would take her to stay with them, yet she had spent her five nights in a hotel, one with more stars awarded it than her own translators earnings would have permitted her, had the hotel accepted her insistence that she be allowed to pay the bill.

No, Dottoressa, the smiling hotel director had told her, LAvvocato has seen to it. Nicos father. LAvvocato. She had started by calling him Dottore, which honorific he had dismissed with a wave of his hand, as though her attempt at deference had been a fly. Avvocato had refused to fall from her lips, and so she had settled on Lei and had used the formal pronoun, after that, for everyone in his family.

Nico had warned her that it would not be easy, but he had not prepared her for what she was to experience during the week. He was deferential to his parents: had she seen this behaviour in anyone other than the man she thought she loved, she would have described it as fawning. He kissed his mothers hand when she came into the room and got to his feet when his father entered.

One night, she had refused to attend the family dinner; he had taken her back to the hotel after their own nervous meal together, kissed her in the lobby, and waited while she got into the elevator before going meekly back to sleep in his parents palazzo. When she demanded the next day to know what was going on, he had replied that he was the product of where he lived, and this was the way people behaved. That afternoon, when he drove her back to the hotel and said hed pick her up at eight for dinner, she had smiled and said goodbye to him at the hotel entrance, gone inside and told the young man at the desk that she was checking out. She went to her room, packed, called for a taxi, and left a note for Nico with the concierge. The only seat on the evening plane to Venice was in business class, but she was happy to pay it, thinking it took the place of at least part of the hotel bill she had not been allowed to pay.