Suffer the Little Children: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

From Publishers Weekly

In Leon's 16th Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery, at once astringent yet lyrical, two rival police forces--Brunetti and his Venetian colleagues and the carabinieri--are both interested in a doctor who illegally adopts an Albanian infant. When three carabinieri break into the doctor's apartment and seize the child at night, they injure the doctor, leaving him mute. Much of the early action takes place in a hospital, and because Venetian hospitals appear only slightly less bureaucratic and Kafkaesque than their stateside counterparts, Leon's marvelous insights into Italian life, so sharp when she explores a military academy in Uniform Justice or glassblowers in Through a Glass, Darkly, aren't as fresh, sinister or compelling here. But once the IVs and bandages give way to vandalism at a pharmacy and the family secrets of a neo-Fascist plumbing tycoon, Leon regains her stride and the novel's last fifth is first-rate and masterful. Leon seldom delivers a "feel good" ending, choosing instead conclusions that are wise and inevitable while still being unsettling. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

On the face of it, there is very little crime in this latest installment in Leon's long-running and justly honored series starring beleaguered Venetian policeman Guido Brunetti. A case of police brutality sets Brunetti on the trail of an illegal-adoption ring and, from there, to a scam involving pharmacists and doctors. But genre readers waiting for the dead bodies to start piling up will have a long wait indeed; it isn't until the last 20 pages that any truly violent crime occurs. Leon's legion of fans, however, know that the Brunetti series isn't about crime as much as it is about more subtle human failings, and there are plenty of those here. Wherever Brunetti turns in this case, he is confronted by ethical dilemmas and by disastrously rigid responses to them. "I don't have any big answers, only small ideas," he laments, while tussling with what to do about the immigrant who sells her baby, the couple who adopts it, the pharmacist who adds moral judgments to every prescription he fills. In some of the best contemporary crime fiction, the heroes are often overwhelmed by the riptide of violence that threatens to consume their lives; Brunetti is equally overwhelmed but by a more insidious foe: our compulsion to judge others and the way those judgments ruin lives. "Nasty little bastard," Brunetti's wife, Paola, declares about one of the principal's in her husband's case. "Most moralists are," Brunetti replies. Bill Ott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved