By Its Cover is the much anticipated twenty-third instalment in Donna Leon's bestselling crime series, where Commissario Brunetti is better than ever as he addresses questions of worth and value alongside his ever-faithful team of Ispettore Vianello and Signorina Elettra.
When a wealthy Venetian woman is found brutally murdered, the prime suspect is her Romanian maid, who has fled the city. As she attempts to leave the country, the maid runs into the path of an oncoming train and is killed. But when the old woman's neighbor returns from abroad, it transpires that the maid could not have been the killer.
At a dinner party given by his parents-in-law, Comissario Brunetti meets Franca Marinello, the wife of a prosperous Venetian businessman. He's charmed - perhaps too charmed, suggests his wife Paola - by her love of Virgil and Cicero, but shocked by her appearance.
When Anna Maria Giusti returns from holiday to find her elderly neighbour Constanza Altavilla dead, with blood on the floor near her head, she immediately alerts the police. Commissario Brunetti is called to the scene and it seems the woman has suffered a fatal heart attack.
When Brunetti is summoned to the bedside of a paediatrician whose skull has been fractured, he is confronted with more questions. Three men have burst into the doctor's apartment in the middle of the night, attacked him and taken away his eighteenth-month-old baby. What could have motivated such a violent assault by the forces of the state?
For Commissario Guido Brunetti it began with an early morning phone call. A sudden act of vandalism has just been committed in the chill Venetian dawn, a rock thrown in anger through the window of a building in the deserted city. But soon Brunetti finds out that the perpetrator is no petty criminal intent on some annoying anonymous act.
The murder of two clam fishermen off the island of Pellestrina, south of Lido on Venetian lagoon, draws Commissario Brunetti into the island's close-knit community, bound together by a code of loyalty and a suspicion of outsiders worthy of the Mafia.
When one of his wife's Paola's students comes to visit him, with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago, Commissario Brunetti thinks little of it. But when the girl is found dead, clearly stabbed to death, Claudia Leonardo suddenly becomes Brunetti's case.
As Venice experiences a debilitating heatwave, Commissario Brunetti escapes the city to spend time with his family. Not knowing what to do, he consults Brunetti and asks permission to trail her. Intrigued, Brunetti asks Signorina Elettra to find out what she can while he's away.
