"A smart and stylish fast-paced case of intrigue and corruption" in the Venetian-set, New York Times–bestselling mystery series (Los Angeles Times).

After a wealthy elderly woman is found brutally murdered in her Venetian apartment, the police suspect her maid, who has disappeared and is heading for her native Romania. But when it becomes clear the maid could not have had time to kill the old woman before catching...

The twenty-fifth mystery in the New York Times–bestselling series "is cause for celebration. . . . Leon brilliantly exposes the corrupt world of Venice" (Bay Area Reporter).

At a fundraising dinner for a Venetian charity, a wealthy and aristocratic patroness asks Brunetti if he will investigate the fifteen-year-old attempted drowning of her granddaughter, which left the girl irreparably brain damaged. Brunetti's...

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....

An accident involving the father of a boy suspected of doing drugs finds Commissario Guido Brunetti pursuing a series of false and contradictory leads before uncovering a long-standing scam and unleashing unintentional consequences.

Longing to visit the cool mountains with his family during a brutally hot tourist season in Venice, commissario Guido Brunetti agrees to help his inspector friend to safeguard an aunt's savings from an unscrupulous astrologer with ties to a shocking act of violence.

At the request of his wife, Commissario Brunetti looks into the death of a deaf, mentally disabled man who worked at their dry-cleaners and uncovers a mystery when the man left no official records and his mother is reluctant to speak to him.

"In his many years as a commissario, Guido Brunetti has seen all manner of crime and known intuitively how to navigate the various pathways in his native city, Venice, to discover the person responsible. Now, in Transient Desires, the thirtieth novel in Donna Leon's masterful series, he faces a heinous crime committed outside his jurisdiction. He is drawn in innocently enough: two young American women have been badly injured in a boating accident,...