Headless Bodies, Faceless Corpses

Crime Guido Brunetti, the compassionate police commissario in Donna Leon’s new Venetian mystery, TRACE ELEMENTS (Atlantic Monthly Press, 278 pp. , $27), always turns to the classics to help him with his tangled thoughts about justice, a concept that, when examined, always seems to him like vengeance. But he gets no help from those avenging furies who always show up in the Greek plays he reads. “We are fierce and cannot be deviated by man,” the Eumenides remind him.

The forgiveness that comes naturally to Brunetti will only lead to “moral chaos,” they warn. But Brunetti can’t help himself. Here, his sympathy is stirred by Benedetta Toso, a young widow dying in hospice care who extracts a promise from the commissario to investigate the death of her husband and the origin of the “bad money” that led to his fatal motorcycle accident — if that’s what it was. It becomes a complex case concerning water; not the canal waters into which Venice is inexorably sinking, but the city’s own precious water supply.

As a native son in a sunbaked culture where a shot of espresso serves as a blood transfusion, Brunetti is constantly dropping into sidewalk cafes for a quick jolt to keep him alert. Here, when he stops at a local shop to get out of the heat, the shopkeeper offers him a glass of water. “It’s the best thing we have,” the man says. By the end of this story, Brunetti would agree.

[ In her By the Book interview, Donna Leon said, “Lew Archer is my favorite detective, and I suppose Tom Ripley is my favorite villain. ” ] The commissario is a dedicated walker, so the street scenes of the city are a constantly changing montage of vivid sights and sounds, from the band of Gypsy girls who apply their pickpocketing skills to the handbag of the mayor’s own wife to the crowds of plodding tourists on the Rialto. Leon’s characterizations are always a treat, especially those of Brunetti’s colleagues like Signorina Elettra Zorzi, a secretary whose skills at computer hacking are such that people speak of her “as at the invocation of Pallas Athena. ” This endlessly enjoyable series, with its deep thoughts about justice and vengeance and charming classical allusions, can’t help making you smile.

♦ Does Kathy Reichs really not know that we relish her Temperance Brennan mysteries because of the gory scenes in the morgue? Guess not, because her latest book, A CONSPIRACY OF BONES (Scribner, 342 pp. , $27), rations the forensic anthropologist to a single autopsy. Granted, the case offers “the grisly allure of feral hogs and a faceless corpse,” and the circumstances are juicy enough for Brennan’s mother to ask her, “You working on this corpse got gnawed by hogs?