I would like to thank NetGalley for providing a copy of this book for review.  Having seen the best and worst that man is capable of, Commissario Guido Brunetti feels it is time for a break in Donna Leon's latest entry in this series, Earthly Remains.  In order to stop a young officer from ruining his career, Brunetti fakes an attack.  Transported to the hospital and subjected to a number of tests, he is diagnosed with stress.  When his wife arranges for his use of a relative's villa he pictures two weeks of reading and rowing out in the lacuna.

Brunetti's first days are just as he imagined.  He befriends the caretaker, Davide Casati, who used to row with his father.  Together they spend their days traveling the laguna and checking Casati's beehives, but the bees are dying and something is now bothering Casati.  When tragedy strikes, Brunetti's must put aside his plans and once again take action.

Leon's love of Venice and the surrounding islands shines through.  She offers descriptive views that place the reader on the streets and canals of the city, on the island of Burano with its colorful buildings and to the small islands that dot the laguna.  The pages turn as smoothly as Casati's boat as it glides through the water. While this is appears as a tribute to the beauty of Venice, the death of Casati's bees and Brunetti's investigation are also a warning that the delicate ecological balance is in danger and the downward spiral must not continue.

As always, it is a pleasure to spend time with Brunetti and his family.  The story seems to end somewhat abruptly but Donna Leon is an author that I always enjoy and heartily recommend.

One of the best in this series....Wonderfull setting,a beautiful island in the Venetian  laguna,full of apricot trees and flooded with brillant sunshine...Brunetti is spending some weeks in this idealistic scenery so he can escape from the stress of his job,but can he?
Good story, interesting characters and as mentioned before, a stunning environment...

Devoted series readers know that Leon's detective hero is one of the most intellectual members of the Venetian police force. His latest adventure tests both his investigative skills and his moral code. While taking a well deserved break from workplace exhaustion, Guido is compelled to look into the seemingly accidental drowning of a retired factory worker. The facts of the case lead to a labyrinth of  suspicions related to a long-ago warehouse disaster and sinister rumors about chemical pollution in Venice's lagoon. Although somewhat slower paced than previous entries, this novel is well worth including on recommended reading lists for mystery lovers.

A new Brunetti book is cause for rejoicing -- and finding a comfortable chair, tuning out the Internet, the TV and the phone, and inhaling its contents. Leon's evocative descriptions of Venice and its inhabitants is always a treat, even though one knows that the plotline will likely end in ambiguity (because that's how real life often is). My only lament is that because Brunetti spends much of his time away from home in this novel, the reader is deprived of the usual descriptions of Paola's simple but fabulous meals.

Thank you.                              
Enjoyed it.
Will get copies for family and friends.

Liked that the setting was just a short distance outside of Venice. Leon did a great job of tying in the environmental concerns of the surrounding area with Venice and its' concerns. Always look forward to reading her new novels. Seems like I learn something new while reading her wonderful novels. Loved the ending!

I would like to thank Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for an advance copy of Earthly Remains, the 26th outing for Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Carabiniere.

Brunetti is suffering from burnout or what he describes as a desire to run away from his job and never return, something we can all sympathise with. His wife, Paola, packs him off to a relative's house on a remote island on the Laguna to rest, read and think. Instead he meets an old friend of his father, Davide Casati, and spends his days rowing and looking at wildlife with him. When Davide disappears Brunetti first organises a search and then gets drawn into finding out what happened.

Earthly Remains is a gentle novel, full of charm. Although Brunetti is a policeman and uses police resources it is not a procedural, more a man trying to explain the death of a new friend. Venice and the Venetian way of life are very much at the forefront, food drink, customs, prejudices, secrets, pragmatism and ambiguity.

There is a dark tone to the novel in the underlying message that money and influence will win against the forces of law, order and justice so it's no wonder that Brunetti is disenchanted but his curiosity and humour go a long way to mitigating this tone. 

I like the fact that Brunetti takes so much pleasure from his simple life on the island. It is a joy to read and contrasts so sharply with the sleaze of his everyday life, just as the weather while hot on the island is enjoyable but the same heat makes city life almost unbearable.

I thoroughly enjoyed Earthly Remains and have no hesitation in recommending it as a good read.

Earthly Remains is a very good entry in this highly readable and reliable series. Unlike Qiu Xiaolong's Chen's foray into environmental issues in Shanghai, Leon's Brunetti's investigation is leaner and much less complex. Nonetheless, Leon writes with such authority as to make this a good entry in both the series and the emerging context of the environment as setting in contemporary mysteries.

Donna Leon revisits the theme of environmental damage. As Commissario Guido Brunetti ages, he's starting to get burned out. After a serio-comic episode, he ends up taking a leave of absence to re-energize himself on a sparsely inhabited island where he, unexpectedly, finds a rowing mentor who knew his father. Of course, someone dies. This is a murder-mystery series, after all. The joy of reading Donna Leon's Brunetti novels is becoming part of Bruno's life, which moves in an arc the way our own lives do, as our children become less an everyday part of our lives and we look for ways to regain some of the pleasure we took in people or activities we enjoyed when we were younger.

Disclaimer:  I am a huge fan of Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti series.  I look forward to each new release. 
This one is a little different from most prior novels as Guido tries to take some time away from the Venetian justice system for some R and R on one of the out islands.  I was a little concerned that we wouldn’t have the presence of some of Leon’s other colorful characters such as the indomitable Signorina Elettra, but, (spoiler alert) an ensuing mystery does bring back all the favorites further on in the book. I also worried that Guido would not have the opportunity to stop for one of his beloved coffees, but, rest assured, he does.    Leon is an extremely literate writer who is a joy to read. 

You do not have to have read the prior books in this series to enjoy this one, but why would you deprive yourself by not reading all of them?

It may seem at first sight a bit far-fetched to see resemblances between Donna Leon and Sara Paretsky, but their trajectories are not dissimilar. Mutatis mutandis, Paretsky’s PI, V. I. Warshawski, was ground-breaking simply by being a woman. The early books followed a well-known template, and poor V.I. suffered more than her share of bruising and battering. V.I.’s great friend is a doctor, Lotty Herschel, an Austrian-Jewish WWII survivor, who deals with the b & b. After a few in-the-genre, good, PI adventures, Paretsky’s pioneering moved into social issues, particularly women’s, and her books had a lot to say. Not least, she put Chicago on the map of celebrated cities in crime fiction. Her Blacklist won the CWA Gold Dagger in 2004. 
A generation and more later, Donna Leon created a male commissario in Venice, Guido Brunetti, and gave him a Henry James-loving, university lecturer wife, whose family belong to the Venetian elite. She also provided Signorina Elletra, a remarkable secretary for the Questura’s Vice-Questore, the loathesome clothes-hanger, Patta. Two strong women and, for that matter, two quite strong children. The early books concentrated on women’s issues, while all the books have something to say about corruption in Venice, where she no longer lives. Her latest novel begins by appearing to be about the stress and abrasions any detective might find himself facing, day in and day out, when—by a fluke—Brunetti finds himself on medical leave, which he takes by going to a house owned by one of his wife’s aunts, where he can be quiet and relatively solitary while he decompresses. Of course this leads elsewhere, first to the discovery that Davide Casati, the handyman who takes care of the house, was an old friend and rowing companion of his father, earning Brunetti a welcome; the two spend hours rowing around the lagoon, forging a friendship based on quiet, comradely movement on the sea.
As so often, there is an undercurrent, a darkness that is first revealed when Davide’s beehives are full of dead bees, a problem he is dealing with by sending samples of the soil, and the dead bees, for scientific scrutiny. Of course this leads elsewhere, to more heartbreaking problems than bees alone, and a wild summer storm brings with it the inevitable death. Brunetti has to go back to his vocation sooner than he intended, enlisting his Neapolitan colleague, Claudia Griffoni, because she is more likely to induce men to talk than is his regular sidekick, Vianello. Leon is very good on male friendships, with a fine sense of how they carry on without many words. This is a grimmer book than many she has written, and what Brunetti reveals offers no happy ending. He is a man steeped in Greek and Latin classics; he has taken several classical authors to reread during his leave. Honey and salt are precious commodities in Graeco-Roman poetry, and the book ends with bees, a vision of them returning from their hives in the lagoon, bringing back ‘pollen and nectar and transform[ing] them by the magic of bees into honey, that sweetest of all things’. 

Earthly Remains is dedicated to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the long-serving US Supreme Court Associate Justice, now in her mid-eighties, who has worked tirelessly for 25 years to help maintain civil rights, especially  those of minorities and women..

Commissario Guido Brunetti is on two week leave for his health, and decides to spend the time at the rural estate of one of Paola’s relatives.  Despite being away from the Questura in Venice, he stumbles into a mystery involving one of his father’s old friends, which becomes even darker and more involved than he initially thought. One of Leon’s best.