Italian intrigue spiced with wit, style

UNLIKE some of Donna Leon’s 14 previous mysteries that open with a crime awaiting the expert attention of Venice detective Guido Brunetti, “Through a Glass, Darkly” spends much of the first half setting up an intricate web of story lines involving one of the city’s most venerated arts: glass blowing. It’s spring, Brunetti has few pressing cases, and his pleasure at seeing his beloved city revive after winter is lovingly rendered by the American author, who has made Venice her home for many years.

Until recently, some of Leon’s books have been hard to find in the United States, even though they’ve been translated into 20 languages, garnered numerous awards and several have attained bestseller status here. Each one I’ve managed to get my hands on has been a smart and stylish, fast-paced case of intrigue and corruption, written with wit, affection and authority.

Leon was born in New Jersey, taught English in Switzerland, Iran, China and then Saudi Arabia, where her experience was so awful, she says in an interview posted on her website, that she moved to Venice. There she landed a job at a University of Maryland extension program at a U.S. Air Force base. The position “allowed me to live as an Italian,” she notes, “and work in English.” She also reviewed crime fiction for several years for the Sunday Times of London.

Leon, who is so passionate about opera that she calls writing her “day job,” was with a friend one evening at the concert hall La Fenice chatting with that night’s conductor and his wife in a dressing room. Conversation turned to an unpopular maestro, for whom the group began to imagine murder. Wordplay triggered a plot, Leon wrote a book, then it “sat in a drawer for a year and a half until a friend of mine nudged me ... into sending it to a Japanese mystery contest.” Her first effort, “Death at La Fenice,” won the contest in 1991 and was published in 1992, and that success led to a two-book contract. Since then she’s written a mystery a year.

As the new novel opens, Commissario Brunetti’s trusted sidekick, Inspector Lorenzo Vianello, asks a favor: An old school chum, Marco Ribetti, has been arrested at a paint factory for protesting the company’s failure to comply with toxic waste disposal regulations. Might Brunetti intervene?

Brunetti agrees, and since lovely weather beckons, they hop into a police launch, the fast way up the Grand Canal and across the laguna to the headquarters on Mestre. There, they easily arrange Ribetti’s release, but as the three depart, Ribetti’s father-in-law, Giovanni De Cal, arrives. Cantankerous and clearly ill, De Cal, a glass factory owner, claims that Ribetti married into the family only for the substantial inheritance. De Cal also resents Ribetti’s conservation activities because ever-stricter legislation costs his business more each year.

Like Carl Hiaasen’s “Skinny Dip,” whose plot turned on industrial water pollution in the Everglades, or John le Carre’s “The Constant Gardener,” which dealt with pharmaceutical companies’ misdeeds in Africa, many of Leon’s mysteries hinge on important social issues. Brunetti is a cop, he has a law degree, but, first and foremost, he is a married man and father of two children; his allegiance to his family and its health is powerful. As Venice’s air and water grow increasingly hazardous, he finds these mounting threats harder to ignore. From book to book, Leon portrays Brunetti’s gradual awakening, gently educating her readers at the same time as her commissario.

Eventually, a death at De Cal’s glass factory requires investigation, and three cryptic papers the dead man left await decoding. Along the way, several Italian constants -- excellent food, government corruption, Venice’s deceptively alluring settings, inept co-workers -- pepper the plot, all written with Leon’s trademark wry spin.

Brunetti’s complex character is deftly drawn as are the characters who recur: his smart, feminist wife, Paola; his dimwitted, social-climbing boss, Vice Questore Patta; fashion plate Signorina Elettra, Patta’s computer-whiz secretary; and the congenial, understated Vianello.

Leon, whose doctoral work was on Jane Austen, calls herself a “recovering academic.” Luckily, those qualities she so admires in English literature and the juicy plot twists in the operas she adores find their way into an evermore impressive body of work.

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Irene Wanner is the author of “Sailing to Corinth.”