Donna Leon

"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, a presumed suicide, in Venice’s elite military academy, Brunetti’s emotions are complex: pity and sorrow for 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. But as Brunetti investigates further...

Commissario Guido Brunetti's hopes of escaping the sweltering heat of Venice in August for a refreshing family holiday in the mountains are dashed when a gruesome discovery is made in a field in Marghera--a body so badly beaten the face is completely unrecognizable. The victim appears to be a transsexual prostitute. Brunetti searches Venice--including the red-light district--for someone who can identify the corpse, but he is met with a wall of silence....

"Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Police confronts a grisly sight when the body of a young man is fished out of a fetid canal. All the clues point to a violent mugging, but for Brunetti the motive of robbery seems altogether too convenient. When something is discovered in the victim's apartment that suggests the existence of a high level conspiracy, Brunetti becomes convinced that somebody, somewhere, is taking great pains to provide a ready-made...

Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Questura is shocked to hear that his friend Brett Lynch, lover of La Scala diva Flavia Petrelli, has been savagely beaten. Then a man's body is found and a terrible confrontation awaits Brett in the Capra family palazzo.

In the eighth book in Donna Leon's internationally bestselling series, Commissario Guido Brunetti's career comes under threat as his professional and personal lives unexpectedly intersect. It all begins with an early morning phone call. In the chill of the Venetian dawn, a sudden act of vandalism shatters the quiet of the city, and Brunetti is shocked to find that the culprit waiting to be apprehended at the scene is his own wife, Paola. She has taken...

Visited by a young bureaucrat concerned about the lack of official approval to build his appartment block years before, Venetian cop Commissario Brunetti launches an investigation when the man is found dead after a mysterious fall from a scaffold, drawing the detective into a dangerous underworld of drug abuse and loan-sharking.

Commissario Guido Brunetti is kicking his heels, pondering the recent lack of crime in Venice, when a beautiful young woman appears at his office door. Now calling herself Maria Testa, his visitor is more familiar to Brunetti as Suor' Immacolata, the nun who once cared for his mother at the Casa di Cura in Dolo. But Maria has recently left her convent after the unexpected deaths of five patients. Brunetti offers to make some inquiries but finds no...

An unassuming uninhabited farmhouse in the Italian countryside delivers up its gruesome secret when its overgrown grounds are cleared for the first time in decades. What is left of the decomposing body is of little help to the urgently summoned Brunetti...until a distinctively valuable signet ring, found nearby, links the mangled remains to a kidnapped scion of Venetian aristocracy.

A literary, visual, and musical exploration of twelve of Handel's arias referencing animals. Complemented by a CD recording, conducted by Alan Curtis with Karina Gauvin (Soprano), Ann Hallenberg (Mezzo-soprano), Paul Agnew, and Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani (Tenor).