Donna Leon - ‘The Girl of His Dreams’

Review by Peter Lawrence on show 24th September 2009
Donna Leon is an American who has lived in, among other places, Switzerland, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia while working as a teacher. For many years now, however, she has made her home in Venice. Since 1992 she has produced a novel faithfully every year featuring her endearing detective Guido Brunetti, a Commissario of the Venetian police. I had never read any of Donna Leon’s books until I recently heard her interviewed on the radio about her latest offering ‘About Face’. I was fascinated by her and what she had to say about her love of Venice, although I can’t quite put my finger on what it was that made me want to read her books.

The book I am reviewing here was released in 2008 and so it the most recent to be published in paperback. It deals with some difficult themes, prejudice and hatred that cause us to make up our minds about the apparent perpetrator of the crime without any real need for convincing evidence, as well as a tendency to ignore evidence that seems to point an uncomfortable finger at the always impeccably honest middle classes. Donna Leon certainly doesn’t shy away from these difficult areas, and she handles them with great skill and a lightness of touch. One comes away with the distinct impression that she is merely reporting on a daily slice of normal Venetian life, although that cannot possibly be so, for if it were, that beautiful city would be one of the most criminally unsafe in the world.

Brunetti has featured in every single one of Donna Leon’s books to date, and in this his seventeenth appearance he shows no sign of running out of steam. The plot of this novel centres around some missing jewellery and cufflinks. Also central to the plot is a drowned girl found in one of Venice’s canals who, despite her youth, no one seems to miss. The trail seems to lead to a gypsy camp outside of the city populated by apparent thugs and ne’er do wells that everyone regards as the dregs of society. There is also another strand of the plot that centres around a shady priest who has been sent back from missionary work in Africa as a result of a scandal and who is now apparently extracting money with menaces from the most gullible members of his congregation, the Children of Jesus Christ.
Brunetti switches from the more mechanical methods of detection used in police procedural novels to the more forensic and intellectual approaches used in psychological thrillers. He is a master at working out what is going on in peoples’ minds, and receives significant help from his wife, a lecturer in English Literature at the university, and his two teenage children. One of the attractions of these books is the rich array of Italian food that is always on offer whilst the family, through normal dinner table conversation, inadvertently reveal clues that help to solve the crimes. It makes us feel as if we could all be great detectives if we wanted to be.

This is a great book. It has inspired me to read more of Donna Leon’s output. I’ve already read her first novel, ‘Death at la Fenice’ and have others lined up on the shelf. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better detective story. Only P D James does it better for me, but then she’s always been in a league of her own for me.


Peter Lawrence September 2009