About this item
In this "powerful" novel in the New York Times-bestselling series, an Italian police detective delves into two deaths and a dark era of history (The Times, London) . When Commissario Guido Brunetti first meets her, Claudia Leonardo is merely one of his wifes students. Intelligent and serious, she 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. Unable to find any living relatives, he visits the elderly Austrian woman who was once Claudias grandfathers lover and with whom Claudia was close - and is stunned by the extraordinary art collection she keeps in her otherwise modest apartment. When she, too, is murdered, Brunettis investigation uncovers shocking skeletons in the closet of Nazi collaboration that few in Italy want revealed . . . "[A] widely admired series." - Chicago Tribune "The appeal of Guido Brunetti, the hero of Donna Leons long-running Venetian crime series, comes not from his shrewdness, though he is plenty shrewd, nor from his quick wit. It comes, instead, from his role as an Everyman . . . [his life is] not so different from our own days at the office or nights around the dinner table. Crime fiction for those willing to grapple with, rather than escape, the uncertainties of daily life." - BOOKLIST
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.
