Donna Leon

To most, Venice is a city famous for its beauty, canals, and culture. To sleuth Commissario Guido Brunetti, it also incorporates an undercurrent of dark corruption and twisted crime. A kidnapping takes the detective doggedly through a trail of clues which starts as unexpectedly as it ends, embroiling Brunetti in a sinister abduction-turned-murder.

When the body of a wealthy woman is found in her Venetian apartment, police suspect her maid, who has disappeared, is responsible for the murder, but Commissario Guido Brunetti believes the maid is innocent and sets out to find the true killer.

Commissario Brunetti runs up against a wall of silence when he sets out to investigate the apparent suicide of a young man, the son of a prominent doctor, found hanged in Venice's elite military academy.

An American friend of Commissario Guido Brunetti is savagely beaten and given this warning: "Don't keep that appointment with Dottor Semenzato." Brunetti begins an investigation that leads deep into the world of illegal antiquities.

Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti becomes involved in the investigation of a possible takeover of the waste disposal industry in Venice by the Mafia, and is surprised to discover the case has links to Franca Marinello, an intriguing woman, disfigured by excessive plastic surgery, Guido met at his in-laws' dinner party.

Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Police is not convinced when the death of a young man whose body is found floating in the canal is assumed to be the result of a violent mugging, and his search for clues to what really happened lead him to a high-level conspiracy.

For Commissario Guido Brunetti it begins with an early morning phone call. A sudden act of vandalism has just been commited in the chill VEnetian dawn. But Brunetti soon discovers that the perpetrator is no petty criminal , for the culprit at the scene is none other that Paola Brunetti, his wife.

Issues of religion and politics take center stage in the household of Venice's Commissario Guido Brunetti when he and his wife go undercover to investigate the possibility that a charlatan posing as a preacher has begun developing an American-style Christian sect in the city, and Brunetti's attempts to investigate the death of a gypsy child found floating in a canal are hindered by sensitivities to multicultural issues.