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Through a Glass Darkly Audio CD – April 6, 2006
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But it is not Marco who has uncovered the guilty secret of the glass foundries, nor he whose body is found lying in front of the furnaces which burn at 1400 degrees C. night and day. The victim has left clues in a copy of Dante and Brunetti must enter an inferno to discover who is burning the land and fouling the waters of Venice's lagoon. A man is dead - but will politics and expedience prevent the killer from striking again?
- Print length0 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAudiobooks
- Publication dateApril 6, 2006
- Dimensions5.59 x 0.94 x 4.92 inches
- ISBN-101856868915
- ISBN-13978-1856868914
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Product details
- Publisher : Audiobooks (April 6, 2006)
- Language : English
- Audio CD : 0 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1856868915
- ISBN-13 : 978-1856868914
- Item Weight : 6.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.59 x 0.94 x 4.92 inches
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
A New Yorker of Irish/Spanish descent, Donna Leon first went to Italy in 1965, returning regularly over the next decade or so while pursuing a career as an academic in the States and then later in Iran, China and finally Saudi Arabia. Leon has received both the CWA Macallon Silver Dagger for Fiction and the German Corrine Prize for her novels featuring Commisario Guido Brunetti. She lives in Venice.
Photo by Michiel Hendryckx (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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I could do without so much detail about people's gestures. Of course a detective must be constantly reading others' movements, but to my taste it becomes tedious.
Interesting, however, to read a mystery with environmental themes in which the investigator is not too concerned about pollution!
In the offering, Guido is drawn to investigate the death for a man he had met that was killed just a few days after they’d spoken.
What does glass blowing have to do with a possible murder on Murano. And, what should Brunetti really be investigating.
Top reviews from other countries
As usual with this series of detective novels, it's always a challenge to see if preconceptions engendered by the title are lived up to by events. All I will say here, without giving too much of the plot away, is that Venice is well known as a centre for glass sculpting, the furnaces for which have for centuries been concentrated on the adjacent island of Murano.
As usual, Donna Leon makes the story all the more believable by the little details she includes in the text. Thus, for example, Vianello turns up at the scene of the crime with gloves but no mask, so Brunetti has to ask another officer for a spare one. This action serves no purpose in the plot. So, is it mere filling? No, it makes the story more cinematic and true to the reader. Another example would be when Brunetti enters the police launch only to find the pilot busy wrapping some tape around a wire.
Where reality does occasionally seem to be stretched is in the relationship Brunetti has with the two leading ladies in his life (excluding his daughter, of course). Paola seems ever to be the perfect wife, whilst colleague Elettra is the perfect source of information. Brunetti would be nowhere without them. (And it is surely incorrect to state in this novel that Elettra had only been working for Patta for six years.)
In previous reviews I have mentioned how Donna Leon's endings are often unsatisfactory because of inherent faults in the Italian legal system. Indeed, in this instalment she has Brunetti consider how, "It had been some time since criminal associations or the evidence of criminal behaviour had served as an impediment to political office." Yet somehow this time the ending is also unsatisfactory in literary terms. Yes, political decisions result in an anticlimax, but there is no release of tension: indeed, no real tension is created for the reader in the first place.
Still, it was an enjoyable ride around the northern shores of the city all the same.
In Donna Leon's latest Brunetti novel ("Through a Glass Darkly"), we find the Commissario once again keeping his eyes peeled for Venetian crimes, especially of corruption, social injustice, and, of course, murder.
His assistant Vianello introduces Brunetti to a friend who's just been arrested for protesting on the island of Murano against environmental pollution. It's a simple matter and the friend Marco is soon released; however, this sets the whole story in motion: a story of corruption and, yes, murder. It's not until the murder, of course, that the police become officially involved.
Marco's father-in-law, who clearly hates Marco, is an owner of one of Murano's famous glass factories. The enmity lies, perhaps, in the fact that Marco is an environmental engineer and is clearly against unlawful pollution of the laguna. The rabid, aging father-in-law is a bully who's clearly out of control, or as Vianello observes he "a choleric man."
Complications arise and Leon is up to her usual level of brilliance in handling first rate police procedurals. An employee of the glass factory is found dead and, as Brunetti suspects, it's a suspicious death. The employee has been most vocal about the hazards of the factory, environmentally, and blames his daughter's tragic illness on the pollution.
Painstakingly, even cleverly, Brunetti and his team at the Questura bring the case to a close and once again Leon's literary magic prevails. Aside from her general plot outlines, Leon's greatest strength seems to lie in her ability to provide great depth to her characters, especially Brunetti, a police officer at once intrepid and all the time human, a man in a profession where integrity is not always a given. Each of the Leon episodes in this series provides additional depth to him and his family. And Leon`s pointed observations of the city and how it's run ("The matter lapsed, merging into the stream of gossip that flowed through Venice, much of it no cleaner than the water that flowed in the canals.") makes one wonder if the Italians actually read her books. Still, it's clear that she loves her overseas home (who wouldn't?) but, a bit like Cassandra outside the gates of Troy, her cries of corruption and incompetence seem largely to go unheeded!
In this 15th episode, we find that the author keeps the series open, and we can only hope she'll pick up the pace. Will it really be another year before her next Brunetti novel? (Billyjhobbs@suddenlink.net)