By Kerryn Goldsworthy
The Girl From Venice
MARTIN CRUZ SMITH
SIMON & SCHUSTER, $32.99
Martin Cruz Smith is the winner of multiple awards for crime writing and is best known as the author of the thriller Gorky Park and its seven sequels. But this is a stand-alone novel set around occupied Venice near the end of the Second World War, when the two surviving sons of an Italian fishing family – one of them now a revered movie star – are caught up in the escape of a beautiful and resourceful young Jewish girl from the clutches of the dying Third Reich. Without really belonging in either tradition, this novel has about it a faint air of both absurdist literature and magic realism. It's reminiscent of both Catch-22 and Captain Corelli's Mandolin, though simpler and more cheerful than either. This is not so much a mystery as a love story, a family comedy, and a homage to the beauties and mysteries of Venice.