Suffer the Little Children: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery (The Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries, 16) - Hardcover

Leon, Donna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087113960X ISBN 13: 9780871139603

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007

Synopsis

Donna Leon’s charming, evocative, and addictive Commissario Guido Brunetti series continues with Suffer the Little Children. When Commissario Brunetti is summoned in the middle of the night to the hospital bed of a senior pediatrician, he is confronted with more questions than answers. Three men -- a young Carabiniere captain and two privates from out of town -- have burst into the doctor's apartment in the middle of the night, attacked him and taken away his eighteenth-month old baby boy. What could have motivated an assault by the forces of the state so violent it has left the doctor mute? Who would have authorized such an alarming operation? At the same time, Brunetti’s colleague Inspector Vianello discovers a money-making scam between pharmacists and doctors in the city. But it appears as if one of the pharmacists is after more than money. Donna Leon's new novel is as subtle and fascinating as ever, set in a beautifully-realized Venice, a glorious city seething with small-town vice.

About this title

About the Author

Donna Leon has lived in Venice for thirty years and previously lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China, where she worked as a teacher. Her novels featuring Commissario Brunetti have all been highly acclaimed, including Friends in High Places, which won the CWA Silver Dagger for Fiction.

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: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 087113960X
• ISBN 13: 9780871139603
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272