A body is pulled out of a Venetian canal and proves to be that of a young American soldier from a base in the hills of the Veneto. Is he the victim of a casual mugging or is there an even more sinister explanation for his death? Commissario Brunetti, the protagonist in all Leon's Venetian tales, finds that his enquiries are leading him inexorably towards dirty linen that few people want to wash in public. Drugs are found in the young man's flat but they may have been planted there to divert attention from other lines of investigation that Brunetti might wish to pursue. Very powerful people indeed have a vested interest in ensuring that the truth about the American's death, and others that follow, should never emerge.

The two great strengths of Donna Leon's splendid series of novels set in Venice are her portrait of the city itself and her creation of Commissario Brunetti. Leon's Venice is not a sentimentalized vision of 'the Pearl of the Adriatic' but a city in which drugs, prostitution and corruption lurk in the shadows. The thoughtful and humane Brunetti moves through its calli and campi with an honest determination to get at as much of the truth as he can but he is only too aware that powers beyond his own are often at work. The Commissario is a rounded and convincing character in a way that few others in contemporary crime fiction are. We see him not only as a professional law officer but as a family man, devoted to his wife Paola and his two children. We share his rueful appreciation that might will usually triumph over right, especially if his superior officer, Patta, a man whose interest lies more in ingratiating himself with the powers that be than in solving crimes, is involved. In Death in a Strange Country, as in Leon's other novels, we are brilliantly drawn into Brunetti's world and the city which he loves.

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