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A Question of Belief by Donna Leon: book review



A Question of Belief  by Donna Leon (2010) is set in Venice, Italy, during a stifling hot summer. 

 

Police Commissioner Guido Brunetti is tired of the heat and the tourists. He wants to go on vacation to the mountains with his wife Paola and his kids. 

 

However, a friend needs assistance with the delayed cases at the local court, which looks like a creative way of corrupting the system – involving Judge Luisa Coltellini and Araldo Fontana. 

 

At the same time, Brunetti’s colleague Inspector Lorenzo Vianello is suspicious of a man’s activities – it seems that the man is conning Lorenzo’s aunt into giving him money. She’s obsessed with fortune-telling tarot card readers and has been withdrawing large sums of money from the family business. Lorenzo asks his boss Brunetti if he can take some time during work to follow his aunt to catch the man.

 
So, before Brunetti can take vacation, he has to supervise two investigations: one official and the other unofficial. He asks Signorina Elletra to help out with the investigations. 

 

But again, before planning to take take time off, Commissioner Brunetti hears about the shocking and violent murder of Araldo Fontana. 

 

This novel is part of a best-selling crime series. I found it to be slow at first, and not as suspenseful as I hoped it would be. Nevertheless, readers will continue to the tidy end, and be quite satisfied. 





 

 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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