Leons latest Guido Brunetti novel begins and ends with funeralsthe first for Brunettis mother and the second for an 11-year-old gypsy girl whose body washes up in Venices Grand Canal. As he launches what he knows will be a fruitless investigation of the girls death, Brunetti is assailed by the ironies of police work in contemporary Italy, where corruption is rampant and where his boss, Patta, king of the bureaucrats, prattles on about multicultural awareness while trying to protect the well-connected from any exposure in the matter of an insignificant gypsys death. But just as Brunetti is incensed by the way his peers ignore the marginalized members of society, so is he appalled by the callousness with which gypsy fathers groom their young children for lives of petty crime. More and more in Leons remarkably rich series, crimes have no solutions, and the problems of daily life yield no answers. And yet, as Brunetti reflects on his loss of the capacity for instinctive trust, we feel just that kind of trust in Brunetti himself, in the idea of a man overwhelmed by a malfunctioning society who soldiers on, doing what good work he can and finding solace in small moments of love and tranquility. It isnt much, but in lives bookended by funerals and filled with frustrations, its what we have. This series becomes less about crime and more about daily life with each new entry, and as it evolves, it becomes clear that Leon deserves her place not only with the finest international crime writers (Michael Dibdin and Henning Mankell, for example) but also with literary novelists who explore the agonies of the everyday (Margaret Drabble and Anne Tyler, among others).