Gonzalo Rodríguez de Tejeda is a fool for love. The gay art guru wants to adopt a handsome younger man so that he will inherit his estate. Conte Falier, Commissario Guido Brunetti’s father-in-law and Gonzalo’s best friend, does not approve. Can the Venetian policeman do anything to prevent it?
The first three chapters of Donna Leon’s latest Italian job (the 28th!) are devoted entirely to the delicate conversation between Il Conte and Guido — and it’s another 140 pages before a corpse is discovered — yet, in its own way, Unto Us a Child is Given is just as exciting as anything by Lee Child or Jeffery Deaver. Is the young man a gold-digger or not? Has human nature changed since classical times?
Brunetti, reading Euripedes’s The Trojan Women, concludes: “These fictive people and what happened to them were much more upsettingly real to him than what he read in even the most graphic police reports.”
And so it is with Leon’s characters.
If you’ve been with them from the beginning (Death at La Fenice, 1992), you will get the most from this thriller. If not, what are you waiting for?
Unto Us a Child is Given by Donna Leon (Heinemann, £20), buy it here.
