Life can be a pretty complicated business for a liberal. How would one take, for example, as Donna Leon does, the plight of eastern European gypsies, driven from the lands of their birth by oppressive regimes, denied their traditional way of life by the imposition of modern norms and forced into little more than holding camps on the ugly edges of industrial cities?
Hated by their new neighbours, they find themselves all but unemployable. They turn instead to activities either on the very fringes of legality - "used car sales" - or those that cross every legal boundary there is, and most moral and ethical ones beside: sending their children into the city to burgle homes and pick pockets.
For many this presents a crisis of conscience: sympathy for the plight of the gypsies, disgust at their behaviour, but then the quandary at the core of the liberal dilemma: do they behave like this because they have no choice, because our society has forced them into a corner, or is it because they have chosen to behave in this way?
This is a struggle that Ispettore Vianello, Commissario Guido Brunetti's partner, grapples with in The Girl of His Dreams, the 17th book in a series that has managed to sustain the very highest quality.
Brunetti and Vianello are thrown into the world of the gypsies, or Rom, when they fish the body of a pretty young girl out of a canal one rainy morning. They quickly establish that the girl was almost certainly burgling a nearby house of a middle class couple. The question to be answered is: how did she end up in the canal?
And here the moral maze becomes that little bit more labyrinthine: it is a question that the wider Questura, in the form of the preening, social-climbing Vice-Questore Patta, simply does not want answered. A gypsy girl, a burglar to boot, has died; very sad, but really, she only had herself to blame... And it was an accident, surely? And, of course, nobody wants to embarrass the burgled couple, particularly when it transpires that their daughter is dating the wayward son of the Interior Minister.
Those familiar with Donna Leon's work will recognise the distinctive Italian pattern here: the police, the government and the other arms of state protect and serve, but they do not do so equally. Money and connections buy these services. If you have neither, you may as well not exist.
That means that, as they often do, Brunetti and Vianello are forced to undertake an investigation that their superiors have ordered them to wind up, and so consequently they have little expectation that they will be able to deliver justice for the victim.
There is no doubt that over the years, Donna Leon has become increasingly disenchanted with Italian politics and society. The barometer for this is the conversation around the Brunetti dining table - a place of rich, sumptuous feasts - and the chats between Vianello and Brunetti as they catch the vaparetto from one crime scene to the next.
And there is now little more than utter contempt for authority in the form of politicians and senior officers and a sense of resignation about the situation. And in the absence of leadership with integrity, the Brunettis brings up their children to know right from wrong and behave as responsible citizens with a strong strain of social conscience. And Vianello and Brunetti investigate every crime with the rigour it deserves, irrespective of who the victim is or the social standing of the suspect.
These are beautiful, beautiful books. The grace of Donna Leon's writing matches the elegance and splendour of its location. Vianello, Brunetti and his wife Paola, are likable, well-adjusted humane people, living in a rotten, corrupt society and doing what they can every day to improve it.
And this book, The Girl of His Dreams, is as good as any of the previous 16, and perhaps it is the best. The ending is as moving as anything I can recall reading anywhere. The book will make you smile, laugh and shake your head. It will make you angry and unable to believe that in a modern European democracy (if that description actually fits Italy, and I doubt it does) the affairs of state could be carried out in such a corrupt fashion.
And finally, it might make you shed a tear or two, as it did me.