[sufue]

Friends in High Places is the ninth in the Guido Brunetti series by Donna Leon. Per SYKM, this was the 2000 Silver Dagger Award winner. (And it's a great series...)

link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097CWN16

Spoiler:

In Friends in High Places, Commissario Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat investigating the lack of official approval for the construction of Brunetti’s apartment years before. What began as a red tape headache ends in murder when the bureaucrat is later found dead after a mysterious fall from a scaffold. Brunetti starts an investigation that will take him into the unfamiliar and dangerous areas of drug abuse and loan-sharking, and will reveal, once again, what a difference it makes in Venice to have friends in high places.