About this item
Publishers Weekly02/03/2014 In bestseller Leon's elegant 23rd Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery (after 2013's The Golden Egg), a Venetian library director reports that several valuable old books have been either stolen or damaged. The likely thief and vandal masqueraded as an American professor, but he has vanished, and his credentials prove false. With few leads, Brunetti turns to a potential witnessa library patron and former priest dubbed Tertullian (after the early Christian author) by the staff because he spends his days reading the church fathers' works. Before the police can interview him, the seemingly innocuous Tertullian is brutally murderedand Brunetti discovers some of the stolen volumes in his home. This character-driven novel looks at the ravages of rare book theft on libraries, and, more broadly, the destructive effects of contemporary greedexemplified by cruise ships damaging Venice's fragile waterwayson cultural heritage.
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.
