Fatal Remedies by Donna Leon - 3.5 stars

[annapi]

My rating is 3.5, but I'll round up. In this volume Brunetti's wife Paola is on a crusade against travel agencies that sell sex tours to third world countries, and this is a bone of contention between them. Brunetti's investigation of the murder of the owner of a travel agency leads to possible ties to the Mafia, and a bigger criminal enterprise than he realized.

The mystery in this one did not really take much effort on Brunetti's part, so it fell a little flat for me although it was still a decent mystery. Much of the story is focused on the marital tiff between the couple, which made the characters more human and more interesting. The resolution of the mystery more or less fell into Brunetti's lap and so ended the book rather sooner than I was expecting, and was tied up in an even neater bow at the very end. I think it was the lack of complexity in the mystery that brought my rating down a half notch, but this does not detract from the series.