Date: 28 Jan 2018
Location: Pat & Carol
For the second month in a row, the Happy Bookers took a literary journey to Italy, this time to the beautiful island city of Venice and the world of police Commissario Guido Brunetti. Acqua Alta is the fifth in Donna Leon’s series of detective thrillers featuring Brunetti. There are twenty-seven novels in the series (which have all been read by one obsessive-compulsive Booker) with another book due out in March (which was pre-ordered last night by this same hapless OCD sufferer).
We had nearly a full house of Bookers at this month’s meeting. Almost everyone read the book and enjoyed it, with but a couple of dissenters. The novel features Brunetti, his wife Paola and their two kids, Brunetti’s odious boss Patta and Patta’s remarkable secretary Signorina Elettra. All of these characters, along with Brunetti’s very capable sergeant (later inspector) Vianello, appear in essentially all of the books in the series.
Acqua Alta also features the opera singer Flavia and her americana lover Brett, both of whom appeared in Death at La Fenice, the first novel in the series. While all of the books have Brunetti solving serious crimes, usually murders, the action is normally fairly low key with Brunetti and his associates analyzing clues and eventually identifying the guilty culprits. Acqua Alta is a little different from most (but not all) of the other books; it is one of the most violent of the series with a very intense ending.
Leon paints vivid images of the city of Venice and, in many of the books, goes into great detail describing the wonderful meals that Paola often creates for her family. But Leon is also unsparing in her descriptions of the ineffectiveness and corruption found at all levels of Italian government and society. And her characters frequently discuss the growing influence and perniciousness of the Southerners–a euphemism for the Mafia. Leon’s books are sold world-wide and have been translated into scores of languages, but, apparently at her request, her books are not available in Italian.
Following a lively discussion of the book and of a variety of tangential subjects, we then had a wonderful meal of lasagna and all sorts of related Italian dishes. What a delightful meeting!
— Bob