Heinemann £15.99 pp245

Nobody mourns Maria Grazia Battestini, the cantankerous elderly woman found battered to death in her Venice apartment: not the remnants of her family, not her doctor, lawyer or priest. Nor does anybody doubt the identity of her killer, the Romanian maid Florinda Ghiorghiu, the latest in a long line of illegal immigrants whose appalling treatment at the hands of Battestini provides ample motive for murder. When the innocent Florinda is herself killed during an attempted flight from the rough justice coming her way, the police are delighted to declare the case closed.

The latest in Donna Leon’s Venetian crime novels sees Commissario Guido Brunetti once again battling the apathy, ambition and downright malevolence of his colleagues, most notably the snakelike Lieutenant Scarpa, against the backdrop of a slowly decaying and creakily modernising city in which every undredged canal exudes a stench of corruption. Even the angels, such as Brunetti’s acolyte Signorina Elettra, are not above a spot of ethical double-dealing to further their progress; even the sybaritic Brunetti himself is portrayed as giving as much consideration to lunching as to sleuthing.

Leon’s talent for sketching Venice with equal measures of affection and exasperation is undimmed, and Brunetti and his serious, thoughtful wife Paola remain subtle and pleasing creations. But readers may wish Leon paid a little more attention to the crimes that, ostensibly, power the novels; in Doctored Evidence — despite a plot that gestures at the city’s attitude towards its population of migrant workers and eventually ties itself up in financial scandal — murder and its solution appear to be given perfunctory, offstage treatment. Leon is correct to assume that her satisfactorily dark portrait of contemporary Italy is ultimately more interesting, but it doesn’t do to be quite so dismissive of the appetite to discover whodunit.

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