From the New York Times bestselling author of Unto Us a Son is Given, comes one of her most dark and thrilling mysteries yet.

A woman’s cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Guido Brunetti to uncover a threat to the entire region in Donna Leon’s haunting twenty-ninth Brunetti novel.

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 will look into what initially appears to be a private family tragedy. They discover that Fadalto worked in the field collecting samples of contamination for a company that measures the cleanliness of Venice’s water supply and that he had died in a mysterious motorcycle accident. Distracted briefly by Vice Questore Patta’s obsession with youth crime in Venice, Brunetti is bolstered once more by the remarkable research skills of Patta’s secretary, Signora Elettra Zorzi. Piecing together the tangled threads, in time Brunetti comes to realize the perilous meaning in the woman’s accusation and the threat it reveals to the health of the entire region. But justice in this case proves to be ambiguous, as Brunetti is reminded it can be when, seeking solace, he reads Aeschylus’s classic play The Eumenides.

As she has done so often through her memorable characters and storytelling skill, Donna Leon once again engages our sensibilities as to the differences between guilt and responsibility.

01/27/2020

At the start of bestseller Leon’s thought-provoking 29th mystery featuring Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti (after 2019’s Unto Us a Son Is Given), Brunetti and his colleague, Commissario Claudia Griffoni, are called to a hospice at the request of 38-year-old Benedetta Toso, who’s dying of cancer. Though Benedetta isn’t fully lucid, Brunetti and Griffoni learn that she suspects foul play in the recent death of her husband, Vittorio Fadalto, a water distribution technician employed by the firm Spattuto Acqua. Vittorio drowned when his motorcycle went off the road, yet he had a reputation for careful behavior when it came to safety. His wife hints that Vittorio was involved in something dishonest, and the expert online sleuthing by a colleague of Brunetti’s uncovers disturbing financial transactions. Brunetti sets out to examine employee activities at Spattuto Acqua, which is charged with maintaining the integrity of Venice’s water supply. As usual, Leon adroitly portrays the complex questions of what constitutes justice and the sad consequences that can result from its pursuit. This long-running series shows no sign of losing steam. Agent: Susanne Bauknecht, Diogenes Verlag (Switzerland). (Mar.)

Donna Leon is the author of the highly acclaimed, internationally bestselling Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery series. The winner of the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, among other awards, Donna Leon lived in Venice for many years and now divides her time between Venice and Switzerland.