Finish What You Started - Fatal Remedies

Heh, I actually have managed to finish a few things I was partway through since commencing Operation Finish What you Started - I've just been too lazy to write the reviews I said I would.

So, anyway, here's one (brief, rambling and/or OTT though it may be):

Fatal Remedies, by Donna Leon.

I first encountered Donna Leon's Brunetti series when I was on vacation in Tasmania. I had made the unusual decision of not taking any books with me, but buying them from second hand shops and leaving them wherever I happened to finish them. The whole point of the exercise was to pick up something I wouldn't normally carry around with me - something written by an author I hadn't read before, and in a genre I don't usually choose.

The first one I happened to pick up was the second Brunetti book, Death in a Strange Country. It was a police procedural (a genre I don't usually read), by Donna Leon (whom I had never read) and it was one dollar from a thrift store (my kind of price).

I found myself quite taken with the story and the character of Commissario Guido Brunetti. I left the book in a bed-and-breakfast, as I had intended, but I found myself wanting more of the same, so I abandoned my plan to pick a work from a different genre and author, and deliberately set out to find another book from the same series. I ended up finding Aqua Alta in a second hand bookshop. It was $6.50, which was a bit more than I had intended to invest in this project, but it was a good read which got me to the end of my holidays.

When I got home, I decided to borrow another Brunetti book from the public library. I was slightly hampered by the fact that I didn't actually have time to go to the library in person, but I asked my mother to pick up something the next time she went in.

The result was Fatal Remedies. I don't know if it was because I was so swamped at work that when I went home I barely had the brain power to read magazines, or if it was because I was surrounded by so many other things to read and watch (during the holiday I also made the choice to abstain from television the entire time, and entertain myself with books and "the great outdoors"), but I found I was reading the book in fits, and quite often putting it down and forgetting to pick it up again.

As a result, the story didn't grab me quite as much as the other books. I don't know if it wasn't as gripping a story, or if I just didn't give myself the chance to be "gripped". It was interesting - and more of an exploration of Brunetti's character than the previous books - but it didn't seem quite as solid as Death in a Strange Country.

The story involved an act of vandalism on the part of Brunetti's wife, Paola - done as a political/social statement about sex-tourism. This act was potentially embarrassing for the commissario, but it got worse when the target of his wife's vandalism was found dead with a hate-note implying that the murder was also to do with the sex-tourism trade.

Of course, it would be a very boring police-procedural if things were quite so cut-and-dried. There are a few twists and turns along the way - all just barely bordering on the believable (but then, so were the other books). The end of the book wrapped up the case, but left the characters with some unresolved issues.

That's probably one of the more interesting things about Leon's books - the case itself is solved, but there are threads left unresolved. At the back of your mind, you know you will probably never hear about them again. The next book isn't likely to pick up those threads and resolve them for you. It still makes you feel as though there's something more to be read - like those formal gardens that have "rooms", where you can see the hint of something else through a passage way or past a hedge.

I haven't read another book in the series, yet. I probably will, though - just not when I have a hundred other things to do.