In the thirty-third installment of Donna Leon´s magnificent series, Commissario Guido Brunetti confronts a present-day Venetian menace and the ghosts of a heroism that never was
Around one AM on an early spring morning, two teenage gangs are arrested after clashing violently in one of Venice´s squares. Commissario Claudia Griffoni, on duty that night, perhaps ill-advisedly walks the last of the boys home because his father, Dario Monforte, failed to pick him up at the Questura. Coincidentally, Guido Brunetti is asked by a wealthy friend of Vice-Questore Patta to vet Monforte for a job, triggering Brunetti´s memory that twenty years earlier Monforte had been publicly celebrated as the hero of a devastating bombing of the Italian military compound in Iraq. Yet Monforte had never been awarded a medal either by the Carabinieri, his service branch, or by the Italian government.
That seeming contradiction, and the brutal attack on one of Brunetti´s colleagues, Enzo Bocchese, by a possible gang member, concentrate Brunetti´s attentions. Surprisingly empowered by Patta, supported by Signorina Elettra´s extraordinary research abilities and by his wife, Paola´s, empathy, Brunetti, with Griffoni, gradually discovers the sordid hypocrisy surrounding Monforte´s past, culminating in a fiery meeting of two gangs and a final opportunity for redemption.
A Refiner´s Fire is Donna Leon at her very best: an elegant, sophisticated storyteller whose indelible characters become richer with each book, and who constantly explores the ambiguity between moral and legal justice.