Amazon.com Review

Guido Brunetti, the protagonist of Donna Leon's brilliant series about crime in high and low places in Venice, Italy, is back in a smart thriller about a murdered street vendor, one of the illegal immigrants who sell fake fashion accessories outside the tourist mecca's high-priced boutiques while trying to stay one step ahead of the law. Someone had a reason for wanting the nameless African man dead, and the search for the killers and the men who sent them to Brunetti's beloved and beautifully evoked city shortly before Christmas leads the thoughtful, multifaceted and uxorious Commissario to the unfamiliar Venetian milieu where the vu cumpra live. In the cramped, airless room where the Senegalese vendors manage to find shelter, Guido discovers a fortune in so-called "conflict diamonds" hidden among the murdered man's meager belongings. But finding the diamonds' provenance and the killers who were seeking them proves to be an exercise in bureaucratic misdirection. Warned off the case by his boss in the name of "national security," Guido nonetheless persists with his investigation, in the course of which he discovers what--and who--really matters to him. Leon depicts the city she also clearly loves with such skill the reader can almost hear the watter lapping at the edges of the canals and smell the espresso beans roasting in the crisp cold winter air. A tour de force from an author whose reputation for skillful plotting, extraordinary descriptive powers, and complex characters has earned her a loyal base of fans; if you haven't discovered her work before this, Blood from a Stone will only whet your appetite for her extensive backlist of titles featuring Brunetti and his colleagues. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this stunning novel, the 14th to feature the dogged, intuitive Venetian police detective Guido Brunetti (after 2004's Doctored Evidence), Leon combines an engrossing, complex plot with an indictment of the corruption endemic to Italian society. The murder of an anonymous African street vendor, an inoffensive, possibly illegal Senegalese immigrant, explodes into a many-layered conundrum. Italian attitudes toward "Senegali" range from the bargain shoppers' approval of their harmless efforts to earn money selling knock-off accessories to legitimate merchants' outrage at competition from the cheaper goods. After Brunetti discovers uncut diamonds hidden in the victim's spartan room and evidence the room was searched, the Interior and Foreign Affairs Ministries take over the case and all of Brunetti's pertinent files, papers and computer disappear. Enraged, Brunetti sidesteps normal police procedures and taps into personal and professional sources, uncovering evidence linking the victim, the Angolan civil war, the Italian secret service and an industrial giant with government connections. Many of Leon's favorite characters appear, including the gourmand Brunetti's family, the obsequious Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta and Patta's irreverent secretary, Signorina Elletra. They balance this dark, cynical tale of widespread secrecy, violence and corruption. Agent, Susanne Bauknecht, Diogenes Verlag (Switzerland). (May 26)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

The heady atmosphere of Venice and a galaxy of fully realized characters enrich this intriguing and finally horrifying tale, the fourth featuring Guido Brunetti, the stalwart and worldly Commissioner of Police in Venice. Shortly after the bodies of eight women are found near a truck that has been in a mountainside accident, Brunetti begins to investigate the shooting death of attorney Carlo Trevisan, counselor to influential industrialists and bankers. Two days later an accountant for politically active manufacturers is found murdered in his car. Both men, Brunetti discovers, had been placing calls to Eastern Europe, Ecuador and Thailand from a pay phone in a disreputable bar in Padua. Probing for more information, Brunetti relies on unique sources: his boss's secretary, who is particularly adept at using computers; a judge who owes him a favor; even his sergeant's wife, who raises gossip to an art form. Brunetti's wife, a professor of English, and his teenaged daughter offer invaluable aid. With consummate skill, Leon (Dressed for Death) gradually reveals the broad reaches of a corrupt network linking the privileged and powerful.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Leon's Italian cop, Guido Brunetti, is a complex man who loves his family and his work despite his jaded outlook. His multifaceted personality combines a humorously lugubrious melancholy, a rapier-sharp wit, a gentle heart, and a keen mind, which makes him not only a fine detective, but also an engaging hero. In her fourth story in the series, Leon presents Brunetti with his most difficult and politically sensitive case to date. High-powered lawyer Carlo Trevisan is found shot to death on the Padua^-Venice train. The police write it off as a robbery gone bad, but Brunetti isn't so sure. When an accountant who worked for Trevisan is found dead a short time later, Brunetti sees a connection, which eventually leads him to an international drug and prostitution ring run by some of Venice's most influential citizens. Leon isn't well known is this country, but she should be. She's a superbly gifted writer whose stories are complex and filled with charm, humor, and intelligence. Do readers a favor and put her books on the shelf. Emily Melton

From AudioFile

Donna Leon has an astute feel for Venice and all the passions and pride of Italian life. As her books are hard to find in America, audiobooks may lead listeners to a great new mystery series. Blackstone has published four of Leon's mysteries featuring police commisario Guido Brunetti and narrated by Anna Fields. While Fields is capable, she has the disadvantage of presenting a story with a male protagonist. Bill Wallis, narrating The Death of Faith, shows a thorough understanding of the rhythms and customs of Venice. He captures Brunetti's chauvinism and projects his delight in the food, architecture and people. He's deft at Brunetti's frustration with bureaucracy and, in this story, the Church. The stories are close to travelogues, with details that the casual or passionate visitor can revel in. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From the Back Cover

Can love overcome even this?

It's 1807 and Australia settlers John and Hannah Bradshaw have worked hard and long to make a good life for themselves at their sheep farm in New South Wales. They have a house that finally feels like a home, and they even have a loving, adopted son. But just when things are looking up, their world is turned upside down.

Years ago, when John was in prison, he was told his first wife died. So how is it that she shows up in Sydney Town looking to pick up where they left off? And what does this shocking news mean for Hannah and their son?

The suspenseful conclusion to the Sydney Cove series, Enduring Love is a gripping story laced with the tender romance and hope that readers have come to expect from Bonnie Leon.

About the Author

Bonnie Leon is the bestselling author of more than ten historical fiction novels. She stays busy teaching women's Bible studies and speaking at writing seminars and conventions. She and her husband, Greg, live in Glide, Oregon.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: Reading The Girl of His Dreams leaves you no choice but to reconsider what makes a mystery novel so good. Certainly there's no denying the appeal of a hard-boiled crime story, where more often than not a brilliant yet battered P.I. drives you white-knuckled to the edge of your seat, but Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti--at once exactingly inquisitive and disarmingly sensitive--bucks that genre convention entirely. Here, in Leon's seventeenth Brunetti mystery, is a man who investigates the tragic drowning of a young Gypsy girl relentlessly, yet--in his thoughtful meanderings through the streets and cafes of Venice--also struggles to understand the human warps and weaknesses that make his beloved city so vulnerable. In the end, it's this pure love and curiosity for life (and, I admit, his lusty appreciation of daily luxuries like prosecco, good coffee, or a burst of sunshine) that make Brunetti such a seductive hero--so much so that you're willing to follow him wherever he goes. --Anne Bartholomew

From Booklist

Starred Review Leon’s latest Guido Brunetti novel begins and ends with funerals—the first for Brunetti’s mother and the second for an 11-year-old gypsy girl whose body washes up in Venice’s Grand Canal. As he launches what he knows will be a fruitless investigation of the girl’s death, Brunetti is assailed by the ironies of police work in contemporary Italy, where corruption is rampant and where his boss, Patta, king of the bureaucrats, prattles on about multicultural awareness while trying to protect the well-connected from any exposure in the matter of an insignificant gypsy’s death. But just as Brunetti is incensed by the way his peers ignore the marginalized members of society, so is he appalled by the callousness with which gypsy fathers groom their young children for lives of petty crime. More and more in Leon’s remarkably rich series, crimes have no solutions, and the problems of daily life yield no answers. And yet, as Brunetti reflects on his loss of the “capacity for instinctive trust,” we feel just that kind of trust in Brunetti himself, in the idea of a man overwhelmed by a malfunctioning society who soldiers on, doing what good work he can and finding solace in small moments of love and tranquility. It isn’t much, but in lives bookended by funerals and filled with frustrations, it’s what we have. This series becomes less about crime and more about daily life with each new entry, and as it evolves, it becomes clear that Leon deserves her place not only with the finest international crime writers (Michael Dibdin and Henning Mankell, for example) but also with literary novelists who explore the agonies of the everyday (Margaret Drabble and Anne Tyler, among others). --Bill Ott

From the Back Cover

They're finally starting a new life together. But will shadows of the old life tear them apart?

Hannah and John have embraced the wondrous land of Australia as their own. As they venture into the unknown to start a sheep farm, they must rely on God and each other to scrape out a living and fulfill their dreams of having a family of their own. But life on the fledgling ranch is fraught with pitfalls and hidden danger. And the past is finally catching up with them.

When a mysterious woman shows up in town, Hannah is in danger of her own dark secrets being revealed. Can John and Hannah weather the storm? Or will the harsh realities of life tear them apart?

Full of genuine longing and the promise of bright hope, Longings of the Heart is the dramatic second book in the Sydney Cove series.

About the Author

Bonnie Leon is the bestselling author of more than ten historical fiction novels. She stays busy teaching women's Bible studies and speaking at writing seminars and conventions. She and her husband, Greg, live in Glide, Oregon.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Set during an oppressive Venetian August, Leon's masterful 19th Commisario Guido Brunetti mystery (after 2009's About Face) presents Brunetti with two puzzles that impinge on his most intimate beliefs. Close associate Ispettore Vianello, who's worried about his elderly aunt's involvement with an astrologer, nudges Brunetti toward ruminations on the differences in male and female evidences of affection. Meanwhile, Toni Brusca, head of employment records at the Commune, who's perplexed by a female judge's erratic court case postponements, surprises Brunetti by implying that a woman could be more criminal than a man. Brunetti patiently untangles a sordid skein of desires warped, trusts abused, and loves distorted into depravity. As one good man who still believes in the rule of law despite his disgust at Italy's mounting corruption, Brunetti allows readers to share his belief that decency and honesty can, for a little while, stave off the angst of the modern world. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Starred Review Leon’s many fans love this series for the Venetian setting, the complex family dynamics, and the hero’s mix of melancholy and compassion, and in this nineteenth installment, they get all of the above. It’s summer in the city for Commissario Guido Brunetti, whose family and colleagues are sweating out the heat wave in largely non-air-conditioned Venice. (Leon does weather as well as any contemporary crime novelist: from Acqua Alta (1996), in which rain-soaked streets became a vivid metaphor for the city’s corruption-drenched politics, to this novel, in which the inescapable heat evokes that same corruption and the way its stench pervades all aspects of society.) Working multiple cases, Brunetti is struggling to find an opportunity to escape with his family to the cool of the mountains, where he dreams of sleeping under an eiderdown quilt. One case involves an aunt’s colleague, who appears to be giving great amounts of cash to a religious charlatan, while another pits Brunetti against his usual adversaries: corrupt politicians (this time it’s a judge who delays trials for a hefty price). As always, Brunetti finds and agonizes over the human tragedies that lurk beneath the creases of criminal activity. He is in the business of assuaging pain rather than solving crimes, especially when the criminals are corrupt officials, who are as unstoppable as the heat is inescapable. Yes, they can be embarrassed, but “if embarrassment were a bar to advancement, there would be no government and no Church.” A unique combination of bedrock cynicism and warm humanity. --Bill Ott

From the Back Cover

A heart-gripping journey toward forgiveness and love Hannah Talbot has no one. Forced to leave the only home she's ever known, she works for a cruel employer who brutally takes the one thing she has left--her dignity. When she is banished to an Australian prison, she is certain God has turned his back on her. How could he--or anyone else--ever love her again? John Bradshaw is a successful businessman, but his untamed spirit wants more. Little does he know what he will have to endure to find the adventure he seeks. Betrayed by those closest to him, he loses everything, even his freedom. There is no returning now. His life is not his own. Now aboard a ghastly prison ship, John and Hannah are about to cross paths. What will happen when two hearts filled with pain discover how to love anew? This first book in the Sydney Cove series will capture your heart. "Hannah's predicament hooked me on the first page and kept me turning pages through the entire book. This may be Bonnie's best book yet."--Jeannie St. John Taylor, author, illustrator, speaker "Bonnie Leon has masterfully written another moving story full of page-turning excitement. I love her ability to write life onto a page in a way we all can relate to."--Maxine Marsolini, author of Raising Children in Blended Families and Blended Families "Bonnie's fans will love cheering for her characters. No protagonists more deserve a happy ending."--Bette Nordberg, author of A Season of Grace

About the Author

Bonnie Leon is the bestselling author of more than ten historical fiction novels. She stays busy teaching women's Bible studies and speaking at writing seminars and conventions. She and her husband, Greg, live in Glide, Oregon.