David Colacci

Hired to investigate a suspicious near-drowning that left a girl permanently brain damaged years earlier, Brunetti struggles to determine if a crime was actually committed, in a case set against a backdrop of dynamic transitions in contemporary Venice.

From the Back Cover: 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....

Commissario Brunetti runs up against a wall of silence when he sets out to investigate the apparent suicide of a young man, the son of a prominent doctor, found hanged in Venice's elite military academy.

After coming to the aid of Vianello's old friend, Ribetti, arrested during an environmental protest, Commissario Brunetti becomes concerned about Ribetti's father-in-law, Giovanni De Cal, a nasty factory owner heard making threats against his son-in-law.

Minneapolis investigators Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska find themselves in pursuit of a serial killer whose latest victim is a bullied adolescent who desperately sought a normal life.

A socialite asks Guido Brunetti to investigate a murder that happened in the underworld surrounding southern Italy's garbage dumping grounds.

When the body of man is found in a canal, damaged by the tides, carrying no wallet, and wearing only one shoe, Brunetti has little to work with. No local has filed a missing-person report, and no hotel guests have disappeared. Where was the crime scene? And how can Brunetti identify the man when he can't show pictures of his face? The autopsy shows a way forward: it turns out the man was suffering from a rare, disfiguring disease. With Inspector Vianello,...

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....

A brutal attack on a pediatrician by a Carabiniere captain and two privates, who also take away the doctor's eighteen-month-old son, draws Commissario Guido Brunetti into a dangerous case involving a ring of baby traffickers.

Patrolling a section of the American West that he finds just as untamed as those depicted in early pulp novels, Charlie Hood is assigned to partner with a popular county veteran whose subsequent murder reveals sinister truths behind the man's stellar reputation.