I have always had a strong, long-lived interest in all things Italian (including Italian food and wine). I spent my third year of university at a campus in Rome and travelled all over Italy during my year there. I’ve been back to Italy as a tourist and researcher numerous times, as five of my ten award-winning novels are set there (in Venice, Rome, Cremona, etc.). I have many Italian friends and my most recent novel,The Artist and the Assassin, is being translated into Italian and will be published by Les Flaneurs Edizioni, an Italian publisher in Bari, Italy.
I recommend this book because Donna Leon takes us inside the fascinating world of Venice. Her fictional detective, Guido Brunetti, is not only brilliant at solving crime (in her many Venetian novels) but has a delightful family (wife and two teenage children). La Fenice is the famous opera house of Venice, so we get to go backstage there as well as backstage in the city of Venice.
'A splendid series . . . with a backdrop of the city so vivid you can almost smell it.' The Sunday Telegraph
Winner of the Suntory Mystery Fiction Grand Prize __________________________________
The twisted maze of Venice's canals has always been shrouded in mystery. Even the celebrated opera house, La Fenice, has seen its share of death ... but none so horrific and violent as that of world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, who was poisoned during a performance of La Traviata. Even Commissario of Police, Guido Brunetti, used to the labyrinthine corruptions of the city, is shocked at the number of…
The Monster of Florence is set in the famous Italian city of Florence (Firenze), as are all of Magdalen Nabb’s mysteries. She gives us fascinating insights into life in Florence, through the eyes of her detective, Marshall Guarnaccia. The Marshall is a very down-to-earth and believable character and does his best at trying to catch a serial killer on the loose in that part of Italy. The author takes the reader right inside life in Florence with a work that is entirely engaging and well-written.
Based on a chilling true crime, The Monster of Florence follows the reopening of a cold case—a serial killer who targeted unmarried couples and terrorized Florence for two decades.
Marshal Guarnaccia's job with the carabinieri—the local Florentine police—usually involves restoring stolen handbags to grateful old ladies and lost cameras to bewildered tourists. So when he is assigned to work with the police in trying to track down a vicious serial killer, he feels out of his league. To make matters worse, the Proc he must report to is Simonetti, the same man he knows drove an innocent man to suicide…
Cleo Cooper, a cross-cultural psychology professor, is living the dream on the Big Island of Hawaii. With ocean-dipping weekends, she enjoys her dog, her job, and her boyfriend Ben - until the day she’s on a research vessel and a dead body is caught in the dragline.
Another in Donna Leon’s series set in Venice with a focus on Commissario Guido Brunetti, a totally believable detective with all the skills any good detective would need to have while meeting up against all the difficulties any detective would encounter in a society (Italy) where the nature of bureaucracy is extremely problematic. So problematic that Brunetti is forced to take a break on a nearby island where he runs into other crimes and difficulties.
'When she's writing about her beloved Venice, Donna Leon can do no wrong. And Earthly Remains, her new mystery featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, is one of her best. It's also one of her saddest, dealing as it does with the seemingly unstoppable polluting of the great lagoon . . . Leon dares to try, once again earning the gratitude of her devoted readers.' New York Times
A New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Top Ten Crime Novel of 2017 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Mystery) __________________________________
The Decameron is an absolute classic of world literature. This 14th-century Italian work remains entirely readable and accessible. The main story: seven young women and three young men living in Florence have decided to try to escape the ravages of the plague, the Black Death, that has hit the city. They decide to flee to a villa in the country. Once there, they agree to pass the time by each of them telling one story each day for ten days. These one hundred short tales of love are extraordinarily entertaining, exciting, bawdy and full of life. A real classic for a good reason.
In the summer of 1348, as the Black Death ravages their city, ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside...
Taken from the Greek, meaning 'ten-day event', Boccaccio's Decameron sees his characters amuse themselves by each telling a story a day, for the ten days of their confinement - a hundred stories of love and adventure, life and death, and surprising twists of fate. Less preoccupied with abstract concepts of morality or religion than earthly values, the tales range from the bawdy Peronella, hiding her lover in a tub, to Ser Cepperallo, who, despite his unholy effrontery, becomes a Saint.…
Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the…
I recommend this non-fiction book because it is a fascinating study of the famous bronze statue of a lion that stands at the top of a column in the heart of Venice and is actually a symbol of the city. The book so intrigued me that I decided to write a novel in which the lion statue was an important, somewhat magical character. That novel was also titled The Lion of Venice and it focused on the life and travels of Marco Polo, likely the most famous Venetian in history.
The Artist and the Assassin is historical fiction based on the fascinating life of the famous Italian painter Caravaggio, who lived and worked in Rome around 1600. The personality of Caravaggio embodied his artistic technique called ‘chiaroscuro,’ which used deep, deep blacks to bring out the brilliance of light. He was both a marvelous creative artist and an extremely difficult man, quick to anger and with a love for sword-fighting on the streets of Rome. The novel ends up as something of a thriller as the assassin in the story tries to chase down and kill Caravaggio.
In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first —and to date only— Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000…
The Road from Belhaven is set in 1880s Scotland. Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small girl that she can see the future. But she soon realises that she must keep her gift a secret. While she can sometimes glimpse…
