Trace Elements

By: Donna Leon

Narrated by: David Colacci

Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's Summary

From the New York Times best-selling author of Unto Us a Son Is Given comes one of her most dark and thrilling mysteries yet. 

A woman’s cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Guido Brunetti to uncover a threat to the entire region in Donna Leon’s haunting 29th Brunetti novel. 

When Dottoressa Donato calls the Questura to report that a dying patient at the hospice Fatebenefratelli wants to speak to the police, Commissario Guido Brunetti and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, waste no time in responding. 

“They killed him. It was bad money. I told him no”, Benedetta Toso gasps the words about her recently-deceased husband, Vittorio Fadalto. Even though he is not sure she can hear him Brunetti softly promises he and Griffoni will look into what initially appears to be a private family tragedy. They discover that Fadalto worked in the field collecting samples of contamination for a company that measures the cleanliness of Venice’s water supply and that he had died in a mysterious motorcycle accident. Distracted briefly by Vice Questore Patta’s obsession with youth crime in Venice, Brunetti is bolstered once more by the remarkable research skills of Patta’s secretary, Signora Elettra Zorzi. Piecing together the tangled threads, in time Brunetti comes to realize the perilous meaning in the woman’s accusation and the threat it reveals to the health of the entire region. But justice in this case proves to be ambiguous, as Brunetti is reminded it can be when, seeking solace, he reads Aeschylus’s classic play The Eumenides. 

As she has done so often through her memorable characters and storytelling skill, Donna Leon once again engages our sensibilities as to the differences between guilt and responsibility.

©2020 Donna Leon (P)2020 Recorded Books

Perfect

Another fabulous Commissario Brunetti book from Donna Leon. A seemingly unrelated to anything request from a dying woman leads Brunetti and his colleagues to look at an unsolved motorcycle accident. That leads to a chemical lab and it goes from there.

One of the things I love about Leon’s writing is the depiction of details. Brunetti’s actions as he gets home from work; his relationship with Paola; the description of his apartment (I want to drink wine on his terrace); the path through the city (the Bridge of Chewing Gum!), for example.

And maybe the best part about these books is the perfect narration by David Colacci. Just delightful.

Writer must have been paid by the word

Thank God I haven't run across many books like this. A more succinct author could have written this story in 2 hours or less. Every scene and every gesture is described in so much detail that it often puts me into a lull and makes me miss important facts. Things only start to happen in the last chapter of the book, by which time you may be beyond caring.

The funniest one

I’ve read all of them, and this is the first time I remember laughing out loud several times. Congrats to Donna Leon for adding comic relief to her skills as a mystery writer.

Not Up To Earlier Books—Slow and Boring

Not the best book in this series but Donna Leon is a master of description and dialogue. The heat in summertime Venice is palpable but there was too much about it. The story is okay but why would the police take such an interest in the death of a woman when no foul play was suspected. Doesn’t seem plausible and the pick pockets are just pawns to divert the reader. Nothing comes of that thread. I love Brunetti and everyone in the Questero and I would expect that they have more to do than investigating this woman’s claim that her husband took bad money and ‘they’ killed him. But, it turns out there was a crime but the finding out about it was dulled by the heat of the summer. The environmental crimes are the hardest to prove but in this case that wasn’t what got solved. I listened to the audible version and always enjoy listening to David Colacci.

This was awful

I’ve read all her books and really loved many but in the last few years there has been a shift. I shifted with her writing and enjoyed a few of the recent ones but this one was impossible. I still can’t figure out why she even bothered. Did she not realize all the rambling would ultimately bore the reader? The only saving grace was David Colacci as narrator. I returned it.

Slow plot and too long

While the narration was great the story was not. I have read/listened to all of Donna Leon's other books but found this one to be a let down. The story took took too long to evolve with too much detail. I hope her next book is up the the standards set by all of her other books.

I would never skip a novel in this series

The narrator, as always, is perfect! The main characters feel like old friends. The setting is splendid. The food is always interesting. Alas, this addition wasn’t one of the finest in this series. The author’s message is without question an extremely important one. Unfortunately, she sacrificed the novel’s pacing to stress her points.

Trace Elements of Style

So this was a weird experience for me. 18 months ago I received an advance copy of the E-book of this novel. My review at the time was short -- the book was incomplete, I couldn't assess it without reading the ending, and asked for the rest of it. Now, I've just finished the audio edition, and I found that the ARC was not incomplete -- the book actually did end in mid-conversation without resolving some plot threads.

I'm stunned at how badly written Trace Elements is, given that it's the 29th entry in a bestselling popular series. Commissario Brunetti is a great character -- the only reason I give the book two stars instead of one (or the zero it really deserves -- but please, he's not the world's brightest detective, is he? The solution to the mystery is fairly obvious right from the start, given the dead man's profession, and we have to watch as Brunetti slowly pieces together what happened in his own mind even as we've already figured it all out.

But to be fair to Brunetti (who is after all a fictional character), he is not the one who is incompetent, the author is. At one point, Brunetti thinks to himself, why didn't I ask for that key piece of information right from the start? And why didn't my hyper-competent research assistant think of asking for it? Of course, the real problem here is that the author didn't think of it earlier, or else she just wanted to draw out the plot so she conveniently allowed an accomplished investigator and his hyper-competent assistant to conveniently forget it.

It gets worse. Brunetti interviews someone the dead man called in his last days. A 20-minute chapter is wasted on this interview, which only adds one minor piece of information, that the dead man suspected something that we as readers have already figured out (quite easily) and took it to a journalist who had written on the subject. The chapter is really just Leon whining about the state of Italian journalism, which may very well be the point, but is bad writing since it doesn't advance the story.

Then there is the red herring sub-plot. Another area that, in the end after it is completely abandoned unresolved, is obviously just something Leon wanted to whine about -- again, no doubt that is her true motivation for introducing it, but it is just bad writing. Two examples of irrelevant material that is just filler.

And then there is the final hour, before the abrupt ending that ends in mid-conversation -- talking villain. An hour! Explaining every little detail, despite the fact that he is confessing to multiple heinous crimes -- despite the fact that Brunetti tries several to get him to stop talking! And this is all doubly bad because we've already figured all this out for ourselves, we really don't need this long winded explanation. Just awful awful story construction.

I'm so disappointed. I've been wanting to read Donna Leon since I first heard of her during my last trip to Venice. I really thought there was a missing ending to the E-book that would tie it all together. The recurring characters are good, from Brunetti on down, but Leon doesn't do them justice. And she insults our intelligence with her storytelling, from discredited devices like the talking villain to the poorly plotted mystery that is so easy to see through from early on to her whining about things that have nothing to do with the story.

And then there's the narration. David Colacci has narrated all 30 entries in this series, so I guess I'm a minority of one in airing this grievance, but who thought it was a good idea to use Italian accents to read English dialogue? In reality they'd be speaking Italian, but Leon is writing in English -- why make them sound like Chico Marx and Father Guido Sarducci and Abbott and Costello's neighbor Mr. Bacciagalupe? Another insult.

Awesome in its timelyness.

Ms. Leon never fails to educate, entertain and make her readers think. I have been a fan for many years and always take the opportunity to recommend her books.

Soporific

A slooow moving tale rendered far less interesting by the narrator. Did I mention the soapbox preaching?