Donna Leon

"What role can or should loyalty play in the life of a police inspector? Brunetti is approached for a favor by Elisabetta Foscarini, a woman he knows casually, but her mother was good to Brunetti's mother, so he feels obliged to at least look into the matter privately, and not as official police business. Foscarini's son-in-law, Enrico Fenzo, has alarmed his wife (her daughter) by confessing their family might be in danger because of something he's...

Through the warm-hearted, perceptive, and principled Commissario Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon has brought us Venice in all its aspects. Now Leon returns to one of her signature subjects: the environment, which has reached a crisis in Italy. In Venice, with the polluted waters of the canals, the issue is significant. For Brunetti, it becomes so when an investigator from the Carabiniere, looking into the illegal hauling of garbage, asks for a favor. (Bestseller)....

"Caterina Pellegrini is a native Venetian, and like so many of them, she's had to leave home to pursue her career. With a doctorate in baroque opera from Vienna, she lands in Manchester, England. Manchester, however, is no Venice. When Caterina gets word of a position back home, she jumps at the opportunity. The job is an unusual one. After nearly three centuries, two locked trunks, believed to contain the papers of a baroque composer have been discovered....

Fifteen years ago, a teenage girl fell into a canal late at night. Unable to swim, she went under and started to drown, only surviving thanks to a nearby man, an alcoholic, who heard her splashes and pulled her out, though not before she suffered irreparable brain damage that left her in a state of permanent childhood, unable to learn or mature. The drunk man claimed he saw her thrown into the canal by another man, but the following day he couldn't...

One afternoon, Commissario Guido Brunetti gets a frantic call from the director of a prestigious Venetian library. Someone has stolen pages out of several rare books. After a round of questioning, the case seems clear: the culprit must be the man who requested the volumes, an American professor from a Kansas university. The only problem--the man fled the library earlier that day, and after checking his credentials, the American professor doesn't exist....

Commissario Guido Brunetti, with the help of Inspector Lorenzo Vianello and the ever-resourceful Signorina Elettra Zorzi, investigates the death of a Venetian widow in a spartan apartment on Campo San Giacomo dell'Orio.

"Your situation is always ambiguous, isn't it, Guido?", his father-in-law, Count Orazio Falier, observes of Donna Leon's soulful detective, Guido Brunetti, at the beginning of her superb 28th Brunetti novel, Unto Us A Son Is Given. "The world we live in makes that necessary," Brunetti presciently replies. Count Falier was urging his Venetian son-in-law to investigate, and preferably intervene in, the seemingly innocent plan of the Count's best friend,...

The author of the Commissario Guido Brunetti series presents more than fifty humorous, passionate, and insightful essays about her life in Venice that also explore her family history, her former life in New Jersey, and the idea of the Italian man.

Vendetta: A high profile attorney and a prominent tax adviser are murdered within days of each other, and Brunetti's investigation leads to Senora Ceroni, and a human-trafficking syndicate within the cream of Venetian society. The anonymous Venetian: The investigation of a murdered bank executive, whose body is found clad in women's attire, leads Brunetti to the subculture of transvestites and male prostitutes, among whom are many characters that...

Death at La Fenice : After a famous conductor dies from cyanide poisoning during the intermission of his concert, Brunetti probes into the maestro's past, and uncovers a shocking picture of immorality and ruthlessness, as well as a legion of bitter enemies, some of whom have held a grudge for many decades. Based on Donna Leon's first Comissarrion Brunetti novel which introduced Guido Brunetti to crime fiction fans worldwide.--Container. Friends in...