Bücher der Reihe A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

As Venice experiences a debilitating heatwave, Commissario Brunetti escapes the city to spend time with his family. Intrigued, Brunetti asks Signorina Elettra to find out what she can while he's away. When news reaches Brunetti that the usher from the Courthouse has been viciously murdered, he returns to investigate.

As Commissario Guido Brunetti watches his mother buried, he takes some solace in the cloud dappled sky, and the tops of the Venretian cypress trees, moving gently in the spring breeze.

On a cold Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a man is killed in a scuffle in Campo San Stefano. As Brunetti starts to investigate the murky subculture of the Venetian underworld, he discovers that life is cheap in the immigrant community and something of much greater value is at stake.

When a wealthy Venetian woman is found brutally murdered, the prime suspect is her Romanian maid, who has fled the city. Commissario Brunetti decides - unofficially - to take on the case himself.

Then something very incriminating is discovered in the dead man's flat - something which points to the existence of a high-level cabal - and Brunetti becomes convinced that somebody, somewhere, is taking great pains to provide a ready-made solution to the crime ...

When one of his wife Paola's students comes to visit him, with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago, Commissario Brunetti thinks little of it, beyond being intrigued and attracted by the girl's intelligence and moral seriousness.

For Commissario Guido Brunetti it began with an early morning phone call. A sudden act of vandalism has just been committed in the chill Venetian dawn, a rock thrown in anger through the window of a building in the deserted city. But soon Brunetti finds out that the perpetrator is no petty criminal intent on some annoying anonymous act.

When Anna Maria Giusti returns from holiday to find her elderly neighbour Constanza Altavilla dead, with blood on the floor near her head, she immediately alerts the police. Commissario Brunetti is called to the scene and it seems the woman has suffered a fatal heart attack.

When a body is found floating in a canal, strangely disfigured and with multiple stab wounds, Commissario Brunetti is called to investigate and is convinced he recognises the man from somewhere.

'The climax is nothing less than a trip - across the laguna - into the heart of darkness ... Leon's special skill is to splice glimpses of la dolce vita with acute analysis of moral and ethical dilemmas ... The series that has shadowed Brunetti for three decades is an epic achievement.' The TimesChosen as Star Pick in the Sunday Times Crime Club__________________________________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.