12 Best Donna Leon Books

During a performance at Venice’s famed La Fenice opera house, a celebrated conductor collapses, poisoned between acts. Commissario Guido Brunetti explores the music world’s rivalries and old scandals to learn who turned a crowded theatre into the perfect crime scene.

Two clam fishermen are murdered off the island of Pellestrina, a tight-knit community suspicious of outsiders. When Signorina Elettra volunteers to stay with relatives there, Brunetti must balance his duty to solve the killings with his fear for her safety.

As winter storms and rising floodwaters threaten Venice, an art historian friend of Brunetti’s is brutally attacked in the palazzo she shares with a famous opera singer. Investigating, Brunetti enters a world of stolen antiquities, museum politics and calculated violence.

Early one morning a young American soldier is pulled from a filthy Venetian canal, his death written off as a mugging. Brunetti’s unease leads him toward toxic-waste deals, military secrecy and a cover-up stretching far beyond one body.

When a long-buried corpse and a signet ring surface near a farmhouse below the Dolomites, Brunetti is drawn into the affairs of a grieving aristocratic family. His search for the truth uncovers old betrayals and a very modern hunger for status.

A disfigured man’s body surfaces in a Venetian canal, with no ID and only a single shoe. When Brunetti learns he was a veterinarian who inspected a slaughterhouse, the trail leads into the meat industry and the moral cost of looking away.

A young bureaucrat visits Brunetti about irregular paperwork on the family apartment, then dies in a mysterious fall from scaffolding. Chasing the truth through city offices and shady contractors, Brunetti sees how permits, favors and friendships can be traded like cash.

A quiet young man known around Brunetti’s neighborhood as deaf and developmentally disabled dies after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Disturbed by how little record there is of his life, Brunetti pulls at the loose threads and exposes a carefully buried family history.

A dying woman in a hospice whispers that her husband’s fatal motorcycle crash involved “bad money.” Brunetti and Claudia Griffoni trace the man’s work at a company testing lagoon water, confronting environmental negligence and the invisible damage done by tainted contracts.

During the COVID pandemic, Brunetti agrees—against his better judgment—to quietly look into the son-in-law of an old neighbor. What begins as a favor leads to vandalism, tax fraud and questions about loyalty, generosity and how far he can bend the rules.

At a dinner party Brunetti meets a charming woman whose heavily altered face masks an unclear past. Meanwhile, he’s assigned to cooperate with a carabiniere investigating illegal toxic-waste trucking. As the two threads converge, personal loyalties collide with environmental crime.

Musicologist Caterina Pellegrini returns to Venice to examine two sealed trunks believed to hold the papers of a forgotten baroque composer. Hired by rival heirs, she pieces together his life and last testament, uncovering long-hidden scandals, family grudges and questions of inheritance.