Beautiful and serene Venice is a city almost divoid of crime. But that is little comfort to Maestro Helmut Wellauer, a world-renowned conductor who is poisoned one night during intermission. As Guido Brunetti, vice-commissario of police and a genius of detection, pieces together the clues, a shocking picture of depravity and revenge emerges.

Commissario Guido Brunetti's hopes of escaping the sweltering heat of Venice in August for a refreshing family holiday in the mountains are dashed when a gruesome discovery is made in a field in Marghera: a body so badly beaten the face is completely unrecognizable. Brunetti searches Venice, including the red light district, for someone who can identify the corpse, but he is met with a wall of silence. Then he receives a phone call promising tantalizing...

Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Questura is shocked to hear that his friend Brett Lynch, lover of La Scala diva Flavia Petrelli, has been savagely beaten. Then a man's body is found and a terrible confrontation awaits Brett in the Capra family palazzo.

"In a small village at the foot of the Italian Dolomites, not far from Venice, the gardens of a deserted farmhouse have lain untouched for decades. But the new owner, anxious for renovations to begin, is summoned to the house when his workmen disturb a macabre grave...Then a valuable signet ring is found nearby. It is the first clue to reignite an infamous cold case of kidnapping and disappearance involving one of Venice's oldest families. Only Commissioner...

Investigating the lack of a building permit for Commissioner Brunetti's apartment, a young bureaucrat uncovers a frightening secret and promptly dies from an apparently accidental fall; investigating his death in turn, Brunetti is drawn into a world of drugs, loan-sharking, and corruption.

When one of his wife's 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. But when the girl is found dead, clearly stabbed to death, Claudia Leonardo suddenly becomes Brunetti's case, no longer Paola's student. Claudia seems to have no discernible living family - her only familial relationship...

Brunetti finds himself fighting a lone battle to prove the innocence of a Romanian housekeeper accused of brutally murdering her miserly employer. With the odds stacked against her from the onset of the investigation when she fled from police, her guilt seems a fait accompli...until a neighbor comes forward to protest the innocence of the accused. Stealthily working his way through the labyrinthine alleys of Venice, death nipping at his heels, Brunetti...

A watchman at a glass factory in Venice is killed, and a copy of Dante's Inferno found at the scene may contain the evidence Brunetti needs to solve the murder.

One cold and rainy morning, the body of a gypsy is found floating in a canal. Brunetti suspects she fell off a nearby roof while fleeing an apartment she had robbed--but something about the case continues to haunt him.

Under the stifling summer sun, Venice is flooded with tourism. Commissario Guido Brunetti is planning the perfect mountain vacation where he can catch up on his reading. However, before he can go, an old friend has him look into a court corruption case. As he probes deeper, Commissario Brunetti quickly becomes embroiled in a shocking murder case that is linked to his own investigation.

Commissario Brunetti investigates the death of an animal lover whose decomposed body was found in a Venice canal.

One afternoon, Commissario Guido Brunetti gets a frantic call from the director of a prestigious Venetian library. Someone has stolen pages out of several rare books. After a round of questioning, the case seems clear: the culprit must be the man who requested the volumes, an American professor from a Kansas university. The only problem--the man fled the library earlier that day, and after checking his credentials, the American professor doesn't exist....

Hired to investigate a suspicious near-drowning that left a girl permanently brain damaged years earlier, Brunetti struggles to determine if a crime was actually committed in a case set against a backdrop of dynamic transitions in contemporary Venice.

Surprised, if not dismayed, to discover from his superior, Vice-Questore Patta, that leaks are emanating from the Questura, Commissario Guido Brunetti is surprised more consequentially by the appearance of a friend of his wife's, fearful that her son is using drugs and hopeful Brunetti can somehow intervene.When Tullio Gasparini, the woman's husband, is found unconscious and with a serious brain injury at the foot of a Venice bridge at midnight, Brunetti...

"When Dottoressa Donato calls the Questura to report that a dying patient at the hospice Fatebenefratelli wants to speak to the police, Commissario Guido Brunetti and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, waste no time in responding. "They killed him. It was bad money. I told him no," Benedetta Toso gasps the words about her recently deceased husband, Vittorio Fadalto. Even though he is not sure she can hear him, Brunetti softly promises he and Griffoni...

"What role can or should loyalty play in the life of a police inspector? It's a question Commissario Guido Brunetti must face and ultimately answer in Give unto Others, Donna Leon's splendid thirty-first installment of her acclaimed Venetian crime series. Brunetti is approached for a favor by Elisabetta Foscarini, a woman he knows casually, but her mother was good to Brunetti's mother, so he feels obliged to at least look into the matter privately,...