Donna Leon

"What role can or should loyalty play in the life of a police inspector? It's a question Commissario Guido Brunetti must face and ultimately answer in Give unto Others, Donna Leon's splendid thirty-first installment of her acclaimed Venetian crime series. 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,...

"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,...

As the first leaves of autumn begin to fall, Vice Questore Patta asks Commissario Guido Brunetti to look into a minor violation committed by the mayor's future daughter-in-law. Brunetti has no interest in helping his boss amass political favors, but has little choice but to comply. Then the sweet, simple-minded man who worked at the dry cleaner dies of a sleeping pill overdose, and Brunetti's wife, Paola, asks him to investigate. But why would anyone...

When the body of man is found in a canal, damaged by the tides, carrying no wallet, and wearing only one shoe, Brunetti has little to work with. No local has filed a missing-person report, and no hotel guests have disappeared. Where was the crime scene? And how can Brunetti identify the man when he can't show pictures of his face? The autopsy shows a way forward: it turns out the man was suffering from a rare, disfiguring disease. With Inspector Vianello,...

"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...

After the body of a wealthy elderly woman is found brutally murdered in her Venetian apartment, the police suspect her maid, who has disappeared and is heading for her native Romania. When the woman is approached by the border police as her train is leaving Italy, she makes a run for it and is killed as she crosses the tracks. She has a considerable sum of money on her and her papers are obvious forgeries. Case closed. But when the old woman's neighbor...

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.

"The internationally bestselling author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries tells her own adventurous life story as she enters her eighties. In a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humor, Donna Leon narrates a remarkable life she feels has rather more happened to her than been planned. From a childhood in the company of her New Jersey family, with frequent visits to her grandfather's farm and its beloved animals, and summers spent...