Acqua Alta (Guido Brunetti Series #5) Book

Ah, Donna Leon! I will never quit you. I said after the last Brunetti mystery I read that I was going to take a break, which is a ridiculous statement that someone should have tried to refute. I liked this much more than the last installment, so I am officially back on the Leon train (or gondola, I suppose).

Here are some great things featured in this book:

- Brunetti learning what Occam's Razor is, and promptly discarding that silly notion since it would never apply to an Italian crime
- Brett Lynch and Flavia Petrelli!!!! my favorite hotshot lesbian couple of all time
- Art hijinks and inter-continental heists
- Two entire pages describing terrible female tourists ordering gelato in bad Italian, while Brunetti watches and exchanges looks with the bartender (spoiler alert: I am this tourist)
- A sentence about the Grand Canal that includes, "where boats went about their boaty business"
- The endless fight against acqua alta, which made this book very atmospheric and its climax particularly awesome
- My golden prince Raffi has been absent from the last two books, but he came back for this:

Raffi closed himself in his room after lunch, saying that he had to do his Greek homework, ten pages of Homer to translate for the next morning. Two years ago, when he had fancied himself an anarchist, he had closed himself in his room to think dark thoughts about capitalism, in the doing perhaps to hasten its fall. But this year he had not only found a girlfriend but, apparently, the desire to be accepted at the university.
As much as I love Brett, I would have actually preferred to get more of the story from Brunetti's perspective. I'm not sure how that would have worked at the ending, but I like these books better when you're able to see the action solely from his point of view. But other than that, I really enjoyed the descriptions of Venice during the winter and found the mystery mildly interesting (which is the best that I can ever actually say for this series).