FALLING IN LOVE By Donna Leon Atlantic Monthly, 256 pages, $28
When we first met the great Italian soprano Flavia Petrelli, practically everybody suspected her of slipping a lethal dose of cyanide into the conductor Helmut Wellauer’s coffee backstage at Le Fenice, the Venice opera house. But Commissario Guido Brunetti deduced that Flavia was innocent.
The person who actually administered the poison was Wellauer’s wife. Not that anybody blamed her since Wellauer was revealed to be a homophobic pedophile of Nazi tendencies. All of this took place in 1992 in Murder
at La Fenice, the first book in Donna Leon’s captivating series featuring the astute Brunetti.
A few books later in Acqua Alta (1996), Brunetti again came to Flavia’s aid when she became innocently mixed up in a murder connected to the antiquities business. And now in the latest Leon book, No. 24 in the series, Flavia is once more singing at La Fenice (Tosca as it happens), and for a third time, she needs the commissario’s services.
It appears that a strange species of stalker may have chosen the great diva as his — or her — target.
The stalker’s first move is to bombard Flavia, on stage and off, with dozens of bouquets of yellow roses. The abundance makes Flavia uneasy; later moves by the stalker terrify her. Brunetti’s sleuthing is required. Apart from the particular puzzle, Fall
ing in Love raises the familiar questions readers ponder in every Brunetti book. How does the commissario’s wife Paola find the inspiration to prepare lavish lunches and sumptuous dinners for her husband and two children every day of the week? And would Brunetti ever solve a single crime without the digging for clues on computer and cellphone by the police secretary, the brilliant Signorina Elettra?
The book doesn’t answer those particular questions, but it offers the usual combination of mystery and dread.