About this item
Early one morning, a sleepy Brunetti confronts a grisly sight, the bloated body of a young man fished out of a fetid Venetian canal. The corpse turns out to be that of an American soldier who was stationed at the U.S. Army post in Vicenza, near Venice. Brunetti's foppish, media-conscious boss likes his cases tied up quickly in the neatest packages possible, and he pressures Brunetti to declare the death drug-related and leave it at that. But the thoroughly spotless life of the deceased and the rarity of drug-related crime in Venice make Brunetti doubt his superior's advice even more than usual. Throwing protocol to the winds, Brunetti scours the base at Vicenza for clues. The suspicious "suicide" of a colleague of the dead soldier and a little boy's rash point Brunetti toward toxic waste dumping and an insidious cover-up that extends from the Mafia to the U.
About the Author
A New Yorker of Irish/Spanish descent, Donna Leon first went to Italy in 1965, returning regularly over the next decade or so while pursuing a career as an academic in the States and then later in Iran, China and finally Saudi Arabia. Leon has received both the CWA Macallon Silver Dagger for Fiction and the German Corrine Prize for her novels featuring Commisario Guido Brunetti. She lives in Venice.
Photo by Michiel Hendryckx (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) ], via Wikimedia Commons.
