Why a Booktrail?
1990s – The ninth in the Brunetti series sees corruption explode in Venice
Friends in High Places ( Brunetti 9)
What you need to know before your trail
Commissario Guido Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat investigating the lack of official approval for the building of his apartment years earlier.
Brunetti knows the score and like any one else in Venice starts to think of whose ear he can whisper in in order to put pressure on the building department. Later on however, he received a phone call from the same official and he sounds scared.
When he later found dead at the bottom of some scaffolding, Brunetti is drawn in to a web of deceit and corruption at the highest levels. His apartment is the least of his worries.
Travel Guide
Venice has always been a city of contrasts in Donna leon’s novels. On the one hand its a city of beauty and spectacular history, of grand buildings, opera and culture. Yet on the other it’s burned and discoloured by its grimy crimes which pervade all sections of society such as murder, robbery, religious scandals and of course corruption within the authorities.
Usually a man with a strict moral code, he’s not averse to bending it a little when he needs to sort out permission required for his own flat. Does his apartment in an historical building even have the right to be there? Of course, it just depends who he asks.
“Reality was there, malleable and obedient: all one had to do was wrest it this way, push it a bit that way, and make it conform to whatever vision one might have. Or if reality proved too intractable, then one simply pulled up the big guns of power and money and opened fire … Brunetti realised that this line of thought led to places he would prefer not to go.”
The way in which he looks to sort out the matter helps show a side to Italy common in the Leon novels -that it is a city of contrasts and that it’s not what you know but who you know. Even if you’re a policeman. In fact, especially if you’re a policeman.
The moral side kicks in when Brunetti feels that given their chats, it should be him who finds out how the man died.
The city of Venice, evoked by all the senses is the place to do it for it judges silently and waits until the right time to cloak you in its dark shroud of intrigue and corruption.
Venice and Brunetti never fails to impress and this time we go right into the heart of the highest echelons of government
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Web: donnaleon.net
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