Suffer the Little Children - Softcover

Leon, Donna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143113615 ISBN 13: 9780143113614

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2008

Synopsis

A riveting new mystery from international bestseller Donna Leon

Donna Leon?s Commissario Brunetti series has made Venice?a city that?s beautiful and sophisticated, but also secretive and corrupt?one of mystery fans? most beloved locales. In this brilliant new book, Brunetti is summoned to the hospital bed of a respected pediatrician, where he is confronted with more questions than answers. Three men had burst into the doctor?s apartment, attacked him, and kidnapped his eighteen-month-old son. What could have motivated an assault so violent that it has left the doctor mute? And could this crime be related to the moneymaking scam run by pharmacists that Brunetti?s colleague has recently uncovered? As Brunetti delves deeper into the case, a story of infertility, desperation, and illegal dealings begins to unfold.

About this title

About the Author

A New Yorker of Irish/Spanish descent, Donna Leon first went to Italy in 1965, returning regularly over the next decade or so while pursuing a career as an academic in the States and then later in Iran, China and finally Saudi Arabia. It was after a period in Saudi Arabia, which she found ‘damaging physically and spiritually’ that Donna decided to move to Venice, where she has now lived for over twenty years.

Her debut as a crime fiction writer began as a joke: talking in a dressing room in Venice’s opera-house La Fenice after a performance, Donna and a singer friend were vilifying a particular German conductor. From the thought ‘why don’t we kill him?’ and discussion of when, where and how, the idea for Death at La Fenice took shape, and was completed over the next four months.

Donna Leon is the crime reviewer for the London Sunday Times and is an opera expert. She has written the libretto for a comic opera, entitled Dona Gallina. Set in a chicken coop, and making use of existing baroque music, Donna Gallina was premiered in Innsbruck. Brigitte Fassbaender, one of the great mezzo-sopranos of our time, and now head of the Landestheater in Innsbruck, agreed to come out of retirement both to direct the opera and to play the part of the witch Azuneris (whose name combines the names of the two great Verdi villainesses Azucena and Amneris).

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
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0143113615
• ISBN 13: 9780143113614
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 336