Friends in High Places (2000) Donna Leon When Commissario Guido Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat investigating the lack of official approval for the building of his apartment years earlier, his first reaction, like any other Venetian, is to think of whom he knows who might bring pressure to bear on the relevant government […]
Fatal Remedies (1999) Donna Leon This is one of my least favorite Brunetti stories, for a very specific reason. The story opens with Paola breaking the window of a travel agency. She does it for noble reason–she wants to make people aware of how these businesses were promoting the sex trade to third world countries. […]
A Noble Radiance (1998) Donna Leon A body is discovered in mountains–a body that had been hastily buried in a shallow grave some time before. The only immediately identifying feature is a signet ring–the ring of a family whose son had been kidnapped and held for random two years before. This was an especially dark […]
Quietly in Their Sleep/Death of Faith (1997) Donna Leon This was published as Death of Faith in Great Britain. So if you come across that, it’s the same as Quietly in their Sleep. Brunetti is surprised by a young woman who comes into his office, asking him to look into the deaths of five of […]
Acqua Alta (1996) Donna Leon This story returns to Brett and Flavia, who we met in the first book, Death at La Fenice. Brett has returned from China, only it appears that someone is not happy for her to have returned. It is the time of acqua alta, or high water, in Venice. The sirens […]
Death and Judgment (1995) Donna Leon This is a very dark story. In fact, considering my mood, I probably should have chosen something completely different to re-read. Attorney Carlo Trevisan was shot on the train, his body discovered right before the train reached the next station. There seem to be no obvious suspects, but the […]
Dressed for Death (1994) Donna Leon A body is discovered in Marghera–the industrial sector near Venice. It’s discovered because one of the worker’s in the slaughterhouse saw a pair of red high heeled shoes that he assumes were abandoned by one of the prostitutes who work in the area, and hoped they were clean and […]
Death in a Strange Country (1993) Donna Leon A body if found in the canal and all signs point to it being an American. ‘Ah, that could be it,’ the doctor said. ‘An American.’ ‘What?’ ‘Why he’s in such good shape,’ Rizzaldi answered… ‘That might explain it. They’re always so fit, so healthy.’ Together, they […]
Death at La Fenice (1992) Donna Leon (A Commissario Brunetti Mystery) When I saw this on sale as an eBook deal of the day on Amazon, I snatched it up. I am slowly coming to prefer eBooks to paper books, and am always glad to get favorites in electronic format. I first stumbled across Commissario […]
Beastly Things (2012) Donna Leon I love this series. I love spending time in Venice with Commissario Brunetti and has family, I love all the characters he deals with, and I love the complexity of his family and co-workers. It’s funny, but for the most part, the mysteries take a back seat to everything else […]
Drawing Conclusions (2010) Donna Leon I love Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti series. Brunetti is a mostly honest police detective who works in a mostly dishonest and entirely complex system. He is also in love with his wife and has two decent kids, and has co-workers who respect him. Of course, everything isn’t perfect. His boss […]
About Face (2009) Donna Leon I checked my shelves and noticed I didn’t have About Face. The reason I didn’t see it is because I’d gotten it on clearance in hardback. So, it’s just as well I now have it in paperback. And of course, once I started reading, I had to finish re-reading it. […]
A Question of Belief (2010) Donna Leon It’s summer in Venice, and Brunetti wishes that all criminals would take a vacation with the rest of the country, to allow them to escape the oppressive heat. But even if the criminals were to take a break, two different problems that may or may not be crimes […]
About Face (2009) Donna Leon Brunetti and Paola are invited to a formal dinner at her parent’s house. During the dinner, Brunetti is seated across from an arresting woman–her facial features are frozen–rumor says through too much plastic surgery. Brunetti is unsure how to take this woman, but when she begins to speak of books, […]
Willful Behavior (2002) Donna Leon I really hate the way this series is released/re-released in the US. This book was originally published in 2002, but I wasn’t able to get my hands on it until this year. Which is frustrating, since it obliquely referred to events in the previous book, which was not the book […]
A Sea of Troubles (2001) Donna Leon I am failing to understand the hows and whys of Penguin’s publishing schedule for Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti series. A Sea of Troubles was first published in 2001, but was published by Penguin and released in the US only this year (2009). Additionally, there was not notice […]
The Girl of His Dreams (2008) Donna Leon This has all of the elements I’ve come to expect of a Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery–death, intrigue, good food, and corrupt Italian politics. This is not to say she presents all Italians as corrupt, after all we have Brunetti and Vianello on the side of the “good […]
Suffer the Little Children (2007) Donna Leon Brunetti is called to the hospital for an assault case, where it turns out that a citizen of Venice has been injured, only the assault isn’t what he was expecting, and draws Brunetti into a case of illegal adoptions. I’d been saving Suffer the Little Children for months, […]
Through a Glass, Darkly (2006) Donna Leon I’ve been trying to slowly read–to savor–Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti books. However, being home sick I’ve read through several in the past couple days, and having finished Through a Glass, Darkly have only one published paperback left. (There are a couple of books that were not republished in […]
Friends in High Places (2000) Donna Leon Apparently, Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti books are not being published in the US following European copyright dates. Friends in High Places has a European copyright of 2000, but was published in the US only recently. Not that this particularly matters in the grand scheme of things, as the […]
Blood from a Stone (2005) Donna Leon In Donna Leon’s fourteenth Commissario Guido Brunetti book, a vu cumpra is shot down on the street by hired assassins. Brunetti is (eventually) called to the scene, and attempts to unravel why a man selling fake handbags was shot in cold blood on the streets. The more Burnetti […]
Doctored Evidence (2004) Donna Leon A querulous old woman is killed in her apartment, and suspicion automatically falls upon the maid. Scarpa closes the case, but when Brunetti comes back into town, new evidence–that Scarpa wants to dismiss unheard–comes to light. This book is not just about discovering who killed a nasty old woman and […]
Uniform Justice (2003) Donna Leon I really like Commissario Guido Brunetti. I like his sense of justice and fairness. I like his intelligence and wit. And I like his wife. In fact I think I wish I was Paola. A boy is found dead in the local military school, and it’s immediately filed as a […]
Fatal Remedies (1999) Donna Leon I started Fatal Remedies immediately after I finished A Noble Radiance, wasn’t sure about the direction the story was taking, and then picked it up again today, as I have a whole stack of Guido Brunetti books waiting to be read. What I was unsure about was how things were […]
A Noble Radiance (1998) Donna Leon The Commissario Guido Brunetti series continues with A Noble Radiance. A body is discovered in a field that has lain fallow for several years, and from the ring found with the body, it is likely that the body is that of a young man who had been kidnapped two […]