The body of an elderly woman is found in her apartment in Venice, and the prime suspect is her Romanian maid. The very afternoon of the murder, the maid is accidentally killed when she tries to cross the border to Romania. Commissario Guido Brunetti is the only one who believes her innocence and faces the challenge of clearing the maid's name and finding the actual killer. Brunetti thinks he has found a lead, but he may be tracking down the wrong...

"Donna Leon's bestselling mystery novels have won a multitude of fans for their insider's portrayal of Venice. From family meals to vaporetti rides, the details and rhythms of everyday life are an integral part of this beloved series. But so are the never-ending influx of tourists and the suffocating corruption. Through it all, Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti, a good man who loves his family and his city, has been an enduring figure, but in Earthly...

A young cadet in Venice's elite military academy has been found hanged, a presumed suicide. Commissario Guido Brunetti is given the case but has difficulty working with a community more concerned with the reputation of the school than the truth. As Brunetti pursues the case he is faced with a wall of silence from everyone involved, including the boy's father. Brunetti is left to wonder if the military protecting its own or has he uncovered a conspiracy...

"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...

Issues of religion and politics take center stage in the household of Venice's Commissario Guido Brunetti when he and his wife go undercover to investigate the possibility that a charlatan posing as a preacher has begun developing an American-style Christian sect in the city, and Brunetti's attempts to investigate the death of a gypsy child found floating in a canal are hindered by sensitivities to multicultural issues.

Set in rural Nebraska, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is both the story of an enduring friendship and a brilliant portrayal of the lives of rural pioneers in the late-nineteenth century. Ántonia and her family are from Bohemia and they must endure real hardship and loss to establish a new home in America. But Ántonia is never broken by adversity, and her strength and love of life stays with her childhood friend Jim for years to come, even as...

On a beautiful spring morning on the island of Pellestrina, south of the Lido on the Venetian lagoon, a small boat moored at the docks suddenly explodes, killing two local clam fishermen. When it becomes clear that the fire was deliberately set, Brunetti decides to investigate. But when he tries to dig up information about the murder, the island's tight-knit--and closemouthed--community closes ranks, forcing Brunetti to accept Signorina Elettra's...

In a mystery that offers an unexpected take on life in contemporary Venice, Commissario Guido Brunetti plunges into the Venetian underworld of illegal African immigrants as he investigates after a street vendor is killed in a scuffle.

"#1 New York Times bestselling author Tami Hoag returns to the bestselling series of her career with a Kovac and Liska case that will delight fans and new readers alike. A murder from the past. A murder from the present. And a life that was never meant to be... As the dreary, bitter weather of late fall descends on Minneapolis, Detective Nikki Liska is restless. After moving to the cold case squad in order to spend more time with her sons, she misses...

When orphaned, ten-year-old Jim Burden arrives in Nebraska to live on his grandparents' farm, he doesn't know what to expect. The Great Plains are so vast that he feels overwhelmed-marooned-blotted out. And what should he make of his new neighbors, the Shimerdas? They don't speak English, and their ways are foreign to him. Yet their fourteen-year-old daughter, Antonia, is pretty, high-spirited-and eager for Jim to teach her English. Will Jim adjust...