This detective series follows Commissioner Guido Brunetti as he investigates crimes in Venice. The stories focus on his personal and professional life, revealing corruption and social issues within Italian society. The series is known for its realistic depiction of investigations and the atmosphere of the city, which becomes almost another protagonist in the story. Each installment brings new cases and moral dilemmas that force Brunetti to reevaluate values and justice.
Who put the cyanide in the Maestro's drink? Guido Brunetti, Venice's genius detective, finds more suspects than clues as a picture of depravity and revenge emerges from his investigation, leaving him torn as to what the law can do, and what needs to be done.
Early one morning Guido Bruneti, commissario of the Venice Police, confronts a grisly sight when the body of a young man is fished out of a fetid Venetian canal. All the clues point to a violent mugging, but for Brunetti, robbery seems altogether too convenient a motive
Commissario Brunetti's hopes of a refreshing holiday with his family are dashed when a body is found in Marghera so badly beaten that the face is unrecognizable. Brunetti searches in vain for someone who can identify the body. Then he receives a call promising some tantalizing information.
When a lorry crashes on one of the treacherous hair-pin bends in the Italian Dolomites even Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Questura is appalled when he learns of its terrible cargo. This is Donna Leon's fourth novel to feature Guido Brunetti.
Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Questura is shocked to hear that Brett Lynch, a friend since a murder case at La Fenice, has suffered a savage beating. The attack, in the beautiful palazzo home of Flavia Petrelli, reigning diva of La Scala, had come with a message: "Don't keep that appointment with Dottor Semenzato."Then, with the storm clouds gathering fast over the city, a man's body is found...
Maria Testa, better known to Brunetti as the nun who once cared for his mother, turns up at the Commissario's door. Maria has left her nursing convent after the suspicious deaths of five patients. Is she creating fears to justify abandoning her vocation, or is there a more sinister scenario?
In a small village at the foot of the Italian Dolomites the gardens of a deserted farmhouse have lain untouched for decades. But the new owner, keen for renovations to start, disturbs a macabre grave, and Commissario Brunetti is called in.
A sudden act of vandalism had just been committed in the chill Venetian dawn. But Commissario Guido Brunetti soon finds out that the perpetrator is no petty criminal. For the culprit waiting to be apprehended at the scene of the crime is none other than Paola Brunetti, his wife.As Paola's actions provoke a crisis in the Brunetti household, Brunetti himself is under increasing pressure at work: a daring robbery with Mafia connections is linked to a suspicious death and his superiors need quick results. As his professional and personal lives clash, Brunetti's own career is under threat - and the conspiracy which Paola had risked everything to expose draws him inexorably to the brink ...
Venetian cop, Commissario Guido Brunetti, wonders whom he knows to bring pressure on a local government department, to investigate the lack of official building approval on his apartment. But when that same official phones him at work, clearly scared by some information he plans to give Brunetti, and is later found dead after a fall from scaffolding, something is clearly wrong, something with far greater implications than the fate of Guido's own apartment. Brunetti's investigations take him into the unfamiliar areas of Venetian life - drug abuse and loan sharking - while the deaths of two young drug addicts, and the arrest and release of a suspected drug dealer, reveal, once again, what a difference it makes in Venice to have 'Friends in High Places'.
Commissario Brunetti finds himself adrift in his 10th investigation--available for the first time in the United States. Suspenseful, provocative, and deeply unsettling, "A Sea of Troubles" is an explosive and irresistible addition to Leon's marvelous series.
From the acclaimed author of The Waters of Eternal Youth, Commissario Guido Brunetti dredges up dark secrets from Italy's anti-Semitic past in his captivating eleventh case. Mystery lovers everywhere are addicted to Donna Leon's ever-honorable Commissario Guido Brunetti and her portrayal of Venice's beautiful but sinister byways and canals. In Willful Behavior, Brunetti is approached for a favor by one of his wife's students. Intelligent and serious , Claudia Leonardo asks for his help in obtaining a pardon for a crime once committed by her now-dead grandfather. Brunetti thinks little of it-until Claudia is found dead. Soon, another corpse and an extraordinary art collection lead Brunetti to long-buried secrets of Nazi collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews-secrets few in Italy want revealed.
Neither Commissario Brunetti nor his wife Paola have ever had much sympathy for the Italian armed forces, so when a young cadet is found hanged, at Venice's elite military academy, Brunetti's emotions are complex: pity and sorrow at the death of a boy close in age to his own son, and contempt and irritation for the arrogance and high-handedness of the boy's teachers and fellow-students. The young man is the son of an ex-politician; a man of an impeccable integrity all too rare in Italian politics. But as Brunetti - and the indispensible Signorina Elettra - investigate further, no-one seems willing to talk, as the military protects its own and civilians keep their own cousel. Is this the natural reluctance of Italians to involve themselves with the authorities or is Brunetti facing a conspiracy of silence?
When the body of a wealthy elderly woman is found, brutally murdered in her Venetian flat, Commissario Brunetti decides - unofficially - to take the case on himself.
On a cold Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a man is killed in a scuffle in Campo San Stefano. The closest witnesses to the event are the tourists who had been browsing the man's wares before his death - fake handbags of every designer label - but they have seen nothing that might be of much help to the police. When Commissario Brunetti arrives on the scene, he finds it hard to understand why anyone would murder an illegal immigrant. They have few social connections and little money; in-fighting is the obvious answer. But once Brunetti begins investigating this unfamiliar Venetian underworld, he discovers that matters of great value are at stake in the immigrant community...
Donna Leon opens doors to the hidden Venice like no one else. With her latest novel, "Through a Glass, Darkly," Leon takes us inside the secretive island of Murano, home of the world-famous glass factories. On a luminous spring day in Venice, Commissario Brunetti and his assistant Vianello play hooky from the Questura in order to help Vianello's friend Marco Ribetti, arrested during an environmental protest. They secure his release, only to be faced by the fury of the man's father-in-law, Giovanni De Cal, a cantankerous glass factory owner who has been heard in the bars of Murano making violent threats about Ribetti. Brunetti's curiosity is piqued, and he finds himself drawn to Murano to investigate. Is De Cal the type of man to carry out his threats? Then one morning the body of De Cal's night watchman is found. Over long lunches, on secret boat rides, in quiet bars, and down narrow streets, Brunetti searches for the killer. Will he unravel the clues before the night watchman's death is allowed to be forgotten? A fascinating novel set in the intersection between tourism and native Venetian society, "Through a Glass, Darkly" is Donna Leon at her finest.
When Commissario Brunetti is summoned to the hospital bedside of a senior paediatrician whose skull has been fractured, he is confronted with more questions than answers. Three men have burst into the doctor's apartment in the middle of the night, attacked him and taken away his 18-month-old son. What can have motivated such an assault?.
One rainy morning Commissario Brunetti and Ispettore Vianello respond to a 911 call reporting a body floating near some steps on the Grand Canal. Reaching down to pull it out, Brunetti's wrist is caught by the silkiness of golden hair, and he sees a small foot - together he and Vianello lift a dead girl from the water. But, inconceivably, no one has reported a missing child, nor the theft of the gold jewellery that she carries. Brunetti is drawn into a search not only for the cause of her death but also for her identity, her family, and for the secrets that people will keep in order to protect their children - be they innocent or guilty. From the canals and palazzos of Venice to a Gypsy encampment on the mainland, Brunetti struggles with institutional prejudice and entrenched criminality to try to unravel the fate of the dead child.
At a dinner party given by his parents-in-law, Commissario 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.A few days later, Brunetti is visited by Carabinieri Maggior Filippo Guarino from the nearby city of Marghera. As part of a wider investigation into Mafia takeovers of businesses in the region, Guarino wants information about the owner of a trucking company who was found murdered in his office. He believes the man's death is connected to the illegal transportation of refuse - and more sinister material - in his company's trucks. No stranger to mutual suspicion and competition between rival Italian police departments, Brunetti is nevertheless puzzled by the younger man's paranoid behaviour.Eventually Guarino agrees to email a photo of his suspect, but by the time the photograph arrives, he himself is dead. Was he killed because he got too close? And why is it that Franca Marinello has often been seen in company of the suspect, a vulgar man with Mafia connections and a violent past?Donna Leon's new novel is as subtle, gripping and topical as ever, bringing the sights, sounds and smells of Venice flooding to life.
In his latest outing, Commissario Guido Brunetti must contend with ingenious corruption, bureaucratic intransigence, and the stifling heat of a Venetian summer.
When a young woman returns from holiday to find her elderly neighbour dead, she immediately alerts the police. Commissario Brunetti is called to the scene.
When a man is found stabbed to death floating in the canal, Commissario Brunetti is convinced he recognises him from somewhere. But with no identification on the body and no reports of people missing from the Venice area, it seems as if he has appeared from nowhere, and the case is at a dead end. It doesn't take long for Brunetti to realise why he remembers the dead man - he saw him at a demonstration a couple of years ago, where farmers were protesting about European milk quotas. But what was his involvement with the protest, and could it have anything to do with his murder? Having nothing to go on but the distinctive shoes the man was wearing, and a disease that had left his body strangely deformed, Brunetti and Inspector Vianello set out to try and discover the man's identity. Their investigation eventually takes them to a slaughterhouse at Preganziol, on the mainland. It is there that Brunetti discovers the dead man's connection with the slaughterhouse, and the world of blackmail and corruption that surrounds it. With a gripping case set before a harrowing exploration of the meat industry, Donna Leon's latest novel is a dark and compelling addition to the Brunetti series.
"Twenty-one years ago, when a conductor was poisoned and the Questura sent a man to investigate, readers first met Commissario Guido Brunetti. Since 1992 s Death at La Fenice, Donna Leon and her shrewd, sophisticated, and compassionate investigator have been delighting readers around the world. For her millions of fans, Leon s novels have opened a window into the private Venice of her citizens, a world of incomparable beauty, family intimacy, shocking crime, and insidious corruption. This internationally acclaimed, bestselling series is widely considered one of the best ever written, and William Heinemann is thrilled to be publishing the twenty-second installment, The Golden Egg, in April 2013. When making routine enquiries into a possible bribery case that could embarrass the mayor a humiliation Vice-Questore Patta is very keen to avoid Commissario Brunetti receives a call from his wife, Paola, who is evidently very upset. The middle-aged deaf mute with the mental age of a child who helped out at the Brunetti s dry cleaners has been found dead an accidental overdose of his mother s sleeping pills and for some reason Paola is distraught by the news. To the
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 several valuable antiquarian books go missing from a prestigious library in the heart of Venice, Commissario Brunetti is immediately called to the scene. The staff suspect an American researcher has stolen them, but for Brunetti something doesn't quite add up. Taking on the case, the Commissario begins to seek information about some of the library's regulars, such as the ex-priest Franchini, a passionate reader of ancient Christian literature, and Contessa Morosini-Albani, the library's chief donor, and comes to the conclusion that the thief could not have acted alone. However, when Franchini is found murdered in his home, the case takes a more sinister turn and soon Brunetti finds himself submerged in the dark secrets of the black market of antiquarian books. Alongside his ever-faithful team of Ispettore Vianello and Signorina Elettra, he delves into the pages of Franchini's past and into the mind of a book thief in order to uncover the terrible truth.
In Death at La Fenice, Donna Leonâe(tm)s first novel in the Commissario Brunetti series, readers were introduced to the glamorous and cut-throat world of opera and to one of Italyâe(tm)s finest living sopranos, Flavia Petrelli âe" then a suspect in the poisoning of a renowned German conductor. Now, many years after Brunetti cleared her name, Flavia has returned to the illustrious La Fenice to sing the lead in Tosca. As an opera superstar, Flavia is well acquainted with attention from adoring fans and aspiring singers. But when one anonymous admirer inundates her with bouquets of yellow roses âe" on stage, in her dressing room and even inside her locked apartment âe" it becomes clear that this fan has become a potentially dangerous stalker. Distraught, Flavia turns to an old friend for help. Familiar with Flaviaâe(tm)s melodramatic temperament, Commissario Brunetti is at first unperturbed by her story, but when another young opera singer is attacked he begins to think Flaviaâe(tm)s fears may be justified. In order to keep his friend out of danger, Brunetti must enter the psyche of an obsessive fan and find the culprit before anyone comes to harm.
In The Waters of Eternal Youth, the twenty-fifth instalment in the bestselling Brunetti series, our Commissario finds himself drawn into a case that may not be a crime at all. Brunetti is investigating a cold case by request of the grand Contessa Lando-Continui, a friend of Brunetti's mother-in-law. Fifteen years ago the Contessa's teenage granddaughter, Manuela, was found drowning in a canal. She was rescued from the canal at the last moment, but in many ways it was too late; she suffered severe brain damage and her life was never the same again. Once a passionate horse rider, Manuela, now aged thirty, cannot remember the accident, or her beloved horse, and lives trapped in an eternal youth. The Contessa, unconvinced that this was an accident, implores Brunetti to find the culprit she believes was responsible for ruining Manuela's life. Out of a mixture of curiosity, pity and a willingness to fulfil the wishes of a loving grandmother, Brunetti reopens the case. But once he starts to investigate, Brunetti finds a murky past and a dark story at its heart. The Waters of Eternal Youth is awash in the rhythms and concerns of contemporary Venetian life, from historical preservation, to housing, to new waves of African migrants, all circling the haunting story of a woman trapped in a perpetual childhood.
During the interrogation of an entitled, arrogant man suspected of giving drugs to a young girl who then died, Commissario Guido Brunetti acts rashly, doing something he will quickly come to regret. In the aftermath, he begins to doubt his career choices and realises that he needs a break from the stifling problems of his work. Granted leave from the Questura, Brunetti is shipped off by his wife, Paola, to a villa owned by a wealthy relative on Sant'Erasmo, one of the largest islands in the Venetian laguna. There, he intends to pass his days rowing, and his nights reading Pliny's Natural History. The recuperative stay goes according to plan and Brunetti is finally able to relax, until Davide Casati, the caretaker of the house, goes missing following a sudden storm. Nobody can find him - not his daughter, not his friends, and not the woman he'd been secretly visiting. Now, Brunetti feels compelled to investigate, to set aside his holiday and discover what happened to the man who had recently become his friend. In Earthly Remains, Donna Leon shows Venice through an insider's 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.
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
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 the old man can't be allowed his pleasure in peace. Not long after Brunetti meets with Gonzalo, the elderly man unexpectedly passes away from natural causes. 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 Gonzalo's best friend, 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 plumbs the twists and turns of the human condition, reuniting us with some of crime fiction's most memorable characters.
A woman's cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Guido Brunetti to uncover a regional threat in this haunting tale. When Dottoressa Donato informs the Questura about a dying patient wishing to speak to the police, Commissario Brunetti and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, respond promptly. Benedetta Toso gasps about her deceased husband, Vittorio Fadalto, claiming, "They killed him. It was bad money. I told him no." Despite uncertainty about her awareness, Brunetti assures her they will investigate what seems to be a private tragedy. They learn Fadalto collected contamination samples for a company monitoring Venice's water quality and died in a mysterious motorcycle accident. While briefly distracted by Vice Questore Patta's focus on youth crime, Brunetti benefits from the research skills of Patta's secretary, Signora Elettra Zorzi. As he untangles the threads of the case, Brunetti realizes the gravity of the woman's accusation and the broader implications for the region's health. However, justice remains ambiguous, echoing the complexities of guilt and responsibility, themes that resonate throughout the narrative, as Brunetti seeks solace in Aeschylus's The Eumenides.
In his many years as a commissario, Guido Brunetti has seen all manner of crime and known intuitively how to navigate the various pathways in his native Venice to discover the person responsible. Now, in the thirtieth novel in Donna Leon's masterful series, he faces a heinous crime committed outside his jurisdiction. He is drawn in innocently enough- two young American women have been badly injured in a boating accident, joy riding in the Laguna with two young Italians. However, Brunetti's curiosity is aroused by the behaviour of the young men, who abandoned the victims after taking them to the hospital. If the injuries were the result of an accident, why did they want to avoid association with it? As Brunetti and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, investigate the incident, they discover that one of the young men works for a man rumoured to be involved in more sinister night-time activities in the Laguna. To get to the bottom of what proves to be a gut-wrenching case, Brunetti needs to enlist the help of both the Carabinieri and the Guardia di Costiera. Determining how much trust he and Griffoni can put in these unfamiliar colleagues adds to the difficulty of solving a peculiarly horrible crime whose perpetrators are technologically brilliant and ruthlessly organised. Donna Leon's thirtieth Brunetti novel is as powerful as any she has written, testing Brunetti to his limits, forcing him to listen very carefully for the truth.
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.
Die Calli, Campi und Caffès, die Brunetti frequentiert, zu Touren verbunden: Zwölf von Toni Sepeda entwickelte und erprobte Spaziergänge und ein Ausflug in die Lagune erschließen die Welt des Commissario. Und der kennt Venedig wie kein anderer: Reich und Arm, heute und früher, bei Tag und bei Nacht.
Rezepte von Roberta Pianaro und kulinarische Geschichten von Donna Leon
Köstliches mit und ohne Kalorien: 91 Rezepte, wie sie Paola in den Brunetti-Romanen kocht, aufgezeichnet von Donna Leons Freundin und Lieblingsköchin Roberta Pianaro. Als kalorienfreier Zwischengang sechs kulinarische Geschichten von Donna Leon sowie wunderschöne Vignetten von Tatjana Hauptmann.
Warum lieben Leser allerorten Brunetti wie einen Freund, mit dem man durch dick und dünn gegangen ist? Wohl weil er ebenso Philosoph ist wie Polizist. Unermüdlich versucht er seine Mitmenschen zu verstehen. Als Italiener, Genießer und Familienmensch glaubt er an das gute Leben, trotz aller Widernisse und Schurken um uns her. Dieses Buch versammelt die besten Gedanken des bekanntesten, klügsten und sympathischsten Commissario: ein abc der Lebenskunst.
On a cold November evening, Guido Brunetti and Paola are up late when a call from his colleague Ispettore Vianello arrives, alerting the Commissario that a hand has been seen in one of Venice's canals. The body is soon found, and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant. Because no official record of the man's presence in Venice exists, Brunetti is forced to use the city's far richer sources of information- gossip and the memories of people who knew the victim. Curiously, he had been living in a garden house on the grounds of a palazzo owned by a university professor, in which Brunetti discovers books revealing the victim's interest in Buddhism, the revolutionary Tamil Tigers, and the last crop of Italian political terrorists, active in the 1980s. As the investigation expands, Brunetti, Vianello, Commissario Griffoni, and Signorina Elettra each assemble pieces of a puzzle-random information about real estate and land use, books, university friendships-that appear to have little in common. Until Brunetti stumbles over something that transports him back to his own student days, causing him to reflect on lost ideals and the errors of youth, on Italian politics and history, and on the accidents that sometimes lead to revelation.
