Give unto others
(Book)

Map on endpapers.

Even with Venice slowly emerging from the worst of the pandemic, the "bodies of dead shops" still line the canals, and most people shun the casual touching that was once a fixture of social interaction. In this newly distanced world, police commissario Guido Brunetti finds how much he misses "the soft, caressing humanity of the past." And, yet, as he learns in this thirty-first episode in Leon's celebrated series, human connectedness can sometimes "metastasize into a tangled mess of obligations." So it happens when a woman from Brunetti's own past, Elisabetta Foscarini, appears in his office, asking for the commissario's help. As a child, Brunetti had limited contact with the older Foscarini, but he knows that her mother was a friend to his mother and feels obligated to conduct an off-the-books investigation of whether Foscarini's son-in-law, an accountant, is involved in something shady. The line between an official and unofficial investigation is muddled when Brunetti and several of his colleagues uncover threads that might connect Foscarini's family to criminal activities, leaving Guido in an all-too-familiar quandary, weighing personal against professional obligations.