Donna Leon’s novels have won her countless fans, heaps of critical acclaim, and a place among the top ranks of international crime writers. Through the warmhearted, perceptive, and principled Commissario Guido Brunetti, Leon’s bestselling books have explored Venice in all its aspects: history, tourism, high culture, food, family, but also violent crime and political corruption.In About Face, Leon returns to one of her signature subjects: the environment, which has reached ...

Late one night, Commissario Guido Brunetti's telefonino rings. A old woman's body has been found in a Spartan apartment on Campo San Giacomo dell'Orio. Brunetti sees some signs of force on the old woman, but they could just as easily have been from the radiator near where she fell. When the medical examiner rules that the woman died of a heart attack, it seems there is nothing to investigate. But he can't shake the feeling that perhaps the woman was threatened.

The final novel of Hermann Hesse, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literatureSet in the twenty-third century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with master...

Orvieto―its very name brings to mind priceless art, colorful ceramics, and straw-colored wine. And the most famous cathedral façade in Italy, a structure of gothic spires, arches, statues, and mosaics. But as Rick Montoya discovers, this jewel of Umbria can have an ugly side as well.When Rick Montoya moved to his mother’s Italy from his father’s Santa Fe, New Mexico, to work as a freelance translator using his dual heritage, he didn’t expect to be helping the Italian police. His ma...

Rick Montoya has just moved from Santa Fe to Rome, embracing the life of a translator. He's beginning to settle in to la dolce vita when school friend Beppo, now senior in the Italian Art Squad, recruits Rick for an unofficial undercover role. Armed with a list of galleries, suspects, and an expense account, Rick arrives in Tuscany posing as a buyer for a Santa Fe gallery to flush out traffickers in priceless burial urns.However, before sunset on his first day in Volterra, the chal...

In his new life as a bartender at the Little Shamrock, Dismas Hardy is just hoping for a little peace. He’s left both the police force and his law career behind. Unfortunately it’s not as easy to leave behind the memory of a shattering personal loss—but for the time being, he can always take the edge off with a stiff drink and a round of darts.But when the news of Eddie Cochran’s death reaches him, Hardy is propelled back into all the things he was trying to escape—and forced to un...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEThe beloved, award-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a Michael Chabon masterwork, is the American epic of two boy geniuses named Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay. Now with special bonus material by Michael Chabon.A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a tr...

Chabon’s extraordinary story of one turbulent weekend in the life of a struggling writer, a satire of the permanent adolescence of the creative classA wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn’t grown up. He’s now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but deeply disturbed student named James Leer. During o...

He performs his profane ceremony in a wooded Minneapolis park, anointing his victims, then setting the bodies ablaze. He has already claimed three lives, and he won’t stop there. Only this time there is a witness. But she isn’t talking.Enter Kate Conlan, former FBI agent turned victim/witness advocate. Not even she can tell if the reluctant witness is a potential victim or something more troubling still. Her superiors are interested only because the latest victim may be the daughte...

When the bullet-ridden body of a Silicon Valley billionaire washes up on shore, assistant D.A. Dismas Hardy finds himself the prosecutor in San Francisco’s murder trial of the century. The suspect: a Japanese call girl with a long list of prominent clients. But when a bizarre series of events blows the case wide open, Hardy finds himself on the other side of the law—as a lawyer for the defense.…“A compelling combination of courtroom drama and whodunit.… Sparked with crackling dialo...

Sometimes the gravest dangers—and the darkest souls—live right beside us….In the span of twenty-four hours, everything Laurel Shields believes about her life and her marriage to a prominent doctor will be shattered—if she survives a terrifying ordeal. The day begins with the jarring discovery that, soon after ending an affair, Laurel is pregnant. But when she returns home to find her husband ashen, unkempt, and on the brink of violence, a nightmare quickly unfolds....

"Your situation is always ambiguous, isn't it, Guido?", his father-in-law, Count Orazio Falier, observes of Donna Leon's soulful detective, Guido Brunetti, at the beginning of her superb 28th Brunetti novel, Unto Us A Son Is Given. "The world we live in makes that necessary," Brunetti presciently replies. Count Falier was urging his Venetian son-in-law to investigate, and preferably intervene in, the seemingly innocent plan of the Count's best friend, the elderly Gonzalo Rodriguez de Tejad...