They’re sure the answers must lie in Bert’s dark past and in the glamorous, occasionally deadly, days of Music Hall. But when the bureaucrat rings Brunetti at work, clearly scared, and is then found dead after a fall from scaffolding, something is obviously going on that has implications greater than the fate of Brunetti’s apartment. To identify the killer, Brunetti consults the incomparable Signorina Elettra, the fashionable secretary who's a whiz at using computers to get helpful information.

You can feel his age here (though I’m not sure precisely what that is) as he wonders around his beautiful home city of Venice, picking out routes that will pass a certain church he hasn’t seen in a while or even one that features some flagstones he particularly likes. Out of a mixture of curiosity, pity and a willingness to fulfil the wishes of a loving grandmother, Brunetti reopens the case.Under Italian inheritance laws, this man would beco The body is soon found, and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant. Brunetti soon realises why he remembers the dead man, and asks Signorina Elettra if she can help him find footage of a farmers’ protest the previous autumn.

Brunetti and Vianello then marvel at the fact that - although they've worked with Alvise for years - they didn't know he was gay, and they're pleased the incident gave Alvise the opportunity to come out to them.

An interesting retrospective of the 1970-80s political troubles in Italy with the Red Brigades' kidnappings and murders. He started to give his name, but a voice he recognized as Vianello’s spoke over his, asking, ‘Guido, can you meet me at Piazzale Roma?

That a soul could have lived such a joyless life is too much for Paola to bear, and she asks Guido if he can find out what happened. During the interrogation of an entitled, arrogant man suspected of giving drugs to a young girl who then died, Brunetti acts rashly, doing something he will quickly come to regret.

It was Alvise, good old Alvise, dressed in jeans and a thick dark blue sweater that zipped up the front, a dark blue windbreaker over it, the sort worn on a boat or on a rainy day.