Acqua Alta

Acqua Alta (1996) Donna Leon

In Acqua Alta we return to two of the characters that Guido met in the first mystery, Death at La Fenice. Brett Lynch is beaten in the doorway of her own apartment. When Guido discovers what has happened he goes to her hospital where he again meets Flavia Pitrelli, with whom he did not have the most cordial relationship several years before. First they must discover why Brett was beaten. Then, when other deaths follow, they must discover how those deaths are related to the assault against Brett.

Guido’s humanity shines through in this story just as strongly as it does in the previous stories. What isn’t as strong, however, is the mystery. Unlike previous book, I was pretty sure that Brett and Flavia were going to survive–it would have been unnecessarily cruel to bring them back just to kill one of them off, and we got to know few other characters, so there was little sense of loss related to the deaths.

Additionally, the scenes with Guido at home with his family seemed almost tacked on, as opposed to these vignettes as they appear in other stories. He still loves his family, but the familial interludes seemed to me to lack the depth of earlier episodes.

We also left Guido’s POV several times to return to Brett. Although this allowed us to follow her part of the story when Guido was absent, it also made her danger less immediate. To her know thoughts as the story passed seemed to say that she would survive to the end of the story to share those thoughts, so her danger, although immediate and severe, as not deadly.

The other off note was that although we began the story with Brett, and returned to her POV several times throughout the story, she is somehow abandoned at th end of the story. Flavia mentions Brett several times, but the shift from knowing what Brett was thinking and feeling to hearing about her third hand was distinctly unsatisfying.

Don’t get me wrong, this was a very good book. I just felt the ending wasn’t nearly as strong as previous books.

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