Donna Leon

Hired to investigate a suspicious near-drowning that left a girl permanently brain damaged years earlier, Brunetti struggles to determine if a crime was actually committed, in a case set against a backdrop of dynamic transitions in contemporary Venice.

"Donna Leon's bestselling mystery novels have won a multitude of fans for their insider's portrayal of Venice. From family meals to vaporetti rides, the details and rhythms of everyday life are an integral part of this beloved series. But so are the never-ending influx of tourists and the suffocating corruption. Through it all, Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti, a good man who loves his family and his city, has been an enduring figure, but in Earthly...

"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,...

"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...

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....

At the request of his wife, Commissario Brunetti looks into the death of a deaf, mentally disabled man who worked at their dry-cleaners and uncovers a mystery when the man left no official records and his mother is reluctant to speak to him.

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.

When Commissario Brunetti is summoned in the middle of the night to the hospital bed of a pediatrician, he is confronted with more questions than answers. Three men-a young carabiniere captain and two privates from out of town-burst into the doctor's apartment while the family was sleeping, attacked him, and took away his eighteen-month-old boy. What could have motivated an assault by the forces of the state that was so violent it has left the doctor...

A socialite asks Guido Brunetti to investigate a murder that happened in the underworld surrounding southern Italy's garbage dumping grounds.

Investigating the lack of a building permit for Commissioner Brunetti's apartment, a young bureaucrat uncovers a frightening secret and promptly dies from an apparently accidental fall; investigating his death in turn, Brunetti is drawn into a world of drugs, loan-sharking, and corruption.