Brunetti Again

A common cuckoo, Cuculus canorus. (Wikipedia)

“The first time you hear a cuckoo in springtime, you have to see how much money you have in your pockets. And the more you have, the more money you’ll get during the year.” (Donna Leon, The Waters of Eternal Youth. p. 290)

I enjoyed this bit of Venetian bird folklore in the midst of a murder investigation by Inspector Brunetti of the Venice police. Author Donna Leon’s usual depiction of local color includes family meals cooked by Brunetti’s wife, coffee and wine in cafés with witnesses and fellow police, the regular flooding of the streets of Venice, the declining quality of life for the local inhabitants, corruption and incompetence in the city and police administrations, Brunetti's wife's aristocratic family, and the clever machinations of police secretary Signorina Elettra who is a well-connected computer genius able to find out anything about anyone (unofficially, of course). This book includes all of these topics, some more fully explored than others. More important: this novel has a good solid mystery for Brunetti and his colleagues to solve, and a nice tight plot that keeps one's attention.

Brunetti has now appeared in over 30 detective novels by Donna Leon. The Waters of Eternal Youth was number 26, published in 2016. The first in the series appeared in 1992, with a new one more or less every year since then, including one that will appear in just a few weeks from now. I’ve read many of  them, and written blog posts on several of them.

My introduction to Donna Leon was her cookbook.
Here it is in 2010 with my original kindle on which
I read some of her novels for the first time.

One element of Donna Leon's books is the portrayal of Brunetti's children, who have remained as adolescents throughout the series, though their opinions and the electronic equipment they use (like phones) keeps up with the time when the book is written – while Brunetti can't master most technology. The first victim in The Waters of Eternal Youth is a young woman who suffered a near-drowning 15 years earlier, and was left with the mental age of a child. Brunetti is charged with finding out what really caused her to fall into the canal. In contrast to the victim's permanent childishness while her body ages, Brunetti and his family can spend 30 years without aging in the least ... that's definitely a mystery with the resolution left up to the reader. I've decided that I don't mind, they can stay frozen that way as long as Donna Leon keeps writing good suspenseful tales. I just wish she would go back to the detailed and luscious descriptions of food that were so wonderful in the earlier books, but her enthusiasm seems to have faded.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.