Reading the Detectives discussion

Welcome to our Jan/Feb 24 buddy read of Quietly in Their Sleep aka The Death of Faith. Published in 1997 this is the sixth book in the Commissario Brunetti Mystery series.

Maria Testa, better known to Brunetti as the nun who once cared for his mother, turns up at the Commissario's door. Maria has left her nursing convent after the suspicious deaths of five patients. Is she creating fears to justify abandoning her vocation, or is there a more sinister scenario?

In the course of his inquiries, Brunetti encounters an unusual cast of characters but discovers nothing that seems criminal. Is the nun simply creating a smoke screen to justify abandoning her vocation? Or has she stumbled onto something very real and very sinister--something that places her own life in imminent danger?

Please feel free to post spoilers in this thread.

As the blurb says this is a story of a nun who has left the order, and is not comfortable with the way people in her care at a nursing home, suddenly died. As Brunetti's mother is in one of these homes, where this nurse was stationed, he is interested but not too concerned, until the nurse is in what could have been a fatal accident.
The plot of this becomes interesting as it proceeds, but it is mostly his family and home life that I get hooked on.

I thought this was an excellent addition to the series. I liked the way Brunetti feels responsible for the woman that his mother was close to, but then you also feel his discomfort at his mother's current challenges and behaviour, which is realistic.

Exactly, I felt this one was personal for Guido, especially as it ran parallel with concerns about the pervy priest teaching his own daughter (can’t wait to see how this is resolved).

This really brought back a lot of memories of that time for me, when the child abuse scandals were rocking the church. My mother was a devout Catholic, she was incensed, like Paola - nothing bad enough could happen to the evil priests and their superiors who let it go on, covered it up, and kept quietly shifting the perpetrators around to fresh victims, basically.

Yup. Moving priests was fairly common. Our parish priest was very nice luckily.

Same here, I guess we were lucky.