Donna Leon is author of the much-loved, best-selling series of novels featuring Commissario Brunetti and one of The Times'' 50 Greatest Crime Writers. Widely considered one of the best detective series ever, with admirers including Ursula K. Le Guin and Antonia Fraser, the Brunetti Mysteries have won numerous awards around the world and been translated into thirty-five languages.>
''Crime writing of the highest order'' GUARDIAN ''Donna Leon has been giving unto us for all of the thirty years since Death at La Fenice introduced us to Brunetti'' Val McDermid The gifted Venetian detective returns in his 31st case - this time, investigating the Janus-faced nature of yet another Italian institution. Brunetti will have to once again face the blurred line that runs between the criminal and the non-criminal, bending police rules, and his own character, to help an acquaintance in danger. ''Both tremendously enjoyable and deeply humane'' JESSIE GREENGRASS, Costa-shortlisted author of The High House ''Leon''s elegant, witty prose . . . is a joy'' AMANDA CRAIG
A woman''s cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Guido Brunetti to uncover a threat to the entire region in Donna Leon''s haunting twenty-ninth Brunetti novel. When Dottoressa Donato calls the Questura to report that a dying patient at the hospice Fatebenefratelli wants to speak to the police, Commissario Guido Brunetti and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, waste no time in responding. ''They killed him. It was bad money. I told him no'', Benedetta Toso gasps the words about her recently-deceased husband, Vittorio Fadalto. Even though he is not sure she can hear him Brunetti softly promises he and Griffoni will look into what initially appears to be a private family tragedy. They discover that Fadalto worked in the field collecting samples of contamination for a company that measures the cleanliness of Venice''s water supply and that he had died in a mysterious motorcycle accident. Distracted briefly by Vice Questore Patta''s obsession with youth crime in Venice, Brunetti is bolstered once more by the remarkable research skills of Patta''s secretary, Signora Elettra Zorzi. Piecing together the tangled threads, in time Brunetti comes to realize the perilous meaning in the woman''s accusation and the threat it reveals to the health of the entire region. But justice in this case proves to be ambiguous, as Brunetti is reminded it can be when, seeking solace, he reads Aeschylus''s classic play The Eumenides . As she has done so often through her memorable characters and storytelling skill, Donna Leon once again engages our sensibilities as to the differences between guilt and responsibility.
Donna Leon was named by The Times as one of the 50 Greatest Crime Writers. She is an award-winning crime novelist, celebrated for the bestselling Brunetti series. Donna has lived in Venice for thirty years and previously lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China, where she worked as a teacher. Donna''s books have been translated into thirty-five languages and have been published around the world. Her previous novels featuring Commissario Brunetti have all been highly acclaimed; including Friends in High Places , which won the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, Fatal Remedies, Doctored Evidence, A Sea of Troubles and Beastly Things .
A suspicious accident draws Brunetti into Venice''s underworld - with unintended, disturbing consequences... When important information is leaked from inside the Venetian Questura, Commissario Guido Brunetti is entrusted with the task of uncovering which of his colleagues is responsible. But before Brunetti can begin his investigation, he is surprised by the appearance in his office of a friend of his wife''s, who is fearful that her son is using drugs. A few weeks later, Tullio Gasparini, the woman''s husband, is found unconscious with a serious head injury at the foot of a bridge, and Brunetti is drawn to pursue a possible connection to the boy''s behaviour. But the truth is not straightforward. Following various contradictory leads, Brunetti navigates his way through a world of mysterious informants, underground deals and secret longstanding scam networks, all the while growing ever more impressed by the intuition of his fellow Commissario, Claudia Griffoni, and by the endless resourcefulness of Signorina Elettra, Vice-Questore Patta''s secretary and gate-keeper. With Gasparini''s condition showing no signs of improvement, and his investigations leading nowhere, Brunetti is steadied by the embrace of his own family and by his passion for the classics. He turns to Sophocles''s Antigone in an attempt to understand the true purpose of justice, and, in its light, he is forced to consider the terrible consequences to which the actions of a tender heart can lead.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLD DAGGER AWARD The latest bestselling Venice crime novel from celebrated author Donna Leon As a favour to his wealthy father-in-law, the Count Falier, Commissario Guido Brunetti agrees to investigate the seemingly innocent wish of the Count''s best friend, the elderly and childless Gonzalo, to adopt a younger man as his son. Under Italian inheritance laws, this man would become the sole heir to Gonzalo''s substantial fortune, something which Gonzalo''s friends, including the Count, find appalling. For his part, Brunetti wonders why they''re so intent on meddling in the old man''s business. Not long after Brunetti meets with Gonzalo, the elderly man unexpectedly passes away from natural causes. Old and frail, Gonzalo''s death goes unquestioned, and a few of his oldest friends gather in Venice to plan the memorial service. But when Berta, a striking woman and one of Gonzalo''s closest confidantes, is strangled in her hotel room, Brunetti is drawn into long-buried secrets from Gonzalo''s past. What did Berta know? And who would go to such lengths to ensure it would remain hidden? Once again, Donna Leon brilliantly follows the twists and turns of the human condition, set against the ebb and flow of Venetian life.
''Crime writing of the highest order'' Guardian __________________________________ Once again, Commissario Guido Brunetti is willing to bend police rules for an acquaintance, even though Elisabetta Foscarini, the woman who asks the favour, is not really a friend. But her mother was good to Brunetti''s, so he feels he has no choice but to repay the debt and agrees to look into the matter ''privately'', rather than as a police official. Her son-in-law has alarmed his wife by telling her they might be in danger because of something he''s involved with. Because Enrico Fenzo is an accountant, Brunetti suspects that the likely reason must be the finances of one of his clients. Brunetti takes a look and finds little: one client is an optician, another Fenzo`s father-in-law, whom he helped establish a charity, another the owner of a restaurant. He is about to tell his friend that he can find no reason for preoccupation when her daughter''s place of work is vandalised, forcing Brunetti to turn his attention - still ''private'' - to Elisabetta''s own family. What he discovers shows the Janus-faced nature of yet another Italian institution as well as the wobbly line that attempts to differentiate between the criminal and the non-criminal.
In the new instalment in the bestselling Commissario Brunetti series, Donna Leon shows Venice through an insiders eyes. From family meals and vaporetti rides to the never-ending influx of tourists and suffocating political corruption, the details and rhythms of everyday Venetian life are at the core of this thrilling novel, and of the terrible crime at its heart.
The bittersweet 25th instalment in the bestselling Brunetti crime series that takes our Commissario into the murky memories of a woman trapped in the past. Commissario Brunetti is investigating a cold case by request of the grand Contessa Lando-Continui. But once he starts to investigate, Brunetti finds a dark past and an unsettling story at its heart.
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.
