Club de Lectura Enjoy Reading 19/10/2017: We are going to read ...
Donna Leon (Nova Jersey, EUA, 1942). is an American of Irish/Spanish descent, author of a series of crime novels set in Venice and featuring the fictional hero Commissario Guido Brunetti. She first went to Italy in 1965 and returned regularly over the next decade or so while pursuing a career as an academic in the U.S. and then later in Iran, China, and finally Saudi Arabia. She finally decided to move to Venice, where she has now lived for over twenty years. Donna Leon was until recently the crime reviewer for the Sunday Times and is an opera expert. She has written the libretto for a comic opera and has set up her own opera company, Il Complesso Barocco. Her crime novels are all set in or near Venice. They are written in English and have been translated into 20 languages, but (under her request) not Italian. She says this is to save her from local celebrity.
Blood from a Stone (2005) Donna Leon's international best-selling and awardwinning Commissario Guido Brunetti novels have been praised for their ability to place their readers into the thick of contemporary Venetian life. Now Blood from a Stone brings Commissario Brunetti back on the scene: On a cold Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a street vendor is killed in a scuffle in Campo Santo Stefano. The closest witnesses to the event are the American tourists who had been browsing the man's wares—fake designer handbags—before his death. The dead man had been working as a vu cumpra, one of the many African immigrants peddling goods outside normal shop hours and trading without work permits. Commissario Brunetti's response is that of everybody involved: Why would anyone kill an illegal immigrant? Because these workers have few social connections and little money, infighting seems to be the answer. And yet the killings have all the markings of a professional operation. Once Brunetti begins to investigate this unfamiliar Venetian underworld, he discovers that matters of great value are at stake within the secretive society. While his wife, Paola, struggles to come to terms with their young daughter's prejudices about the immigrants, Brunetti finds that his own police force shares many of the same biases. Warned by Patta, his superior, to desist from further involvement in the case, Brunetti only becomes more determined to unearth the truth. How far will Brunetti be able to penetrate the murky subculture of Venice's illegal community? And how high does the corruption reach into the upper echelons of Brunetti's own world and the world at large? By a confirmed master storyteller, Blood from a Stone is a pitch-perfect mystery, an alluring portrait of contemporary Venice, and an elucidating eye into the attitudes of a timeless place in the grip of change. Source: bookbrowse.com
To know more:
Writer’s web
A conversation with Donna Leon
Living in Venice