Friends in High Places - Softcover

Leon, Donna

3.89

11,066 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014311414X ISBN 13: 9780143114147

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2008

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The winner of the Crime Writers Association Macallan Silver Dagger?available for the first time in the United States

Donna Leon?s sophisticated Commissario Brunetti series has won her legions of fans over the years. In Friends in High Places, Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat investigating the lack of official approval for the building of Brunetti?s apartment years before. What began as a red tape headache ends in murder when the bureaucrat is found dead after a mysterious fall from a scaffold. Brunetti starts an investigation that will take him into unfamiliar and dangerous areas of Venetian life, and will reveal, once again, what a difference it makes to have friends in high places.

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About the Author:

A New Yorker of Irish/Spanish descent, Donna Leon first went to Italy in 1965, returning regularly over the next decade or so while pursuing a career as an academic in the States and then later in Iran, China and finally Saudi Arabia. It was after a period in Saudi Arabia, which she found ‘damaging physically and spiritually’ that Donna decided to move to Venice, where she has now lived for over twenty years.

Her debut as a crime fiction writer began as a joke: talking in a dressing room in Venice’s opera-house La Fenice after a performance, Donna and a singer friend were vilifying a particular German conductor. From the thought ‘why don’t we kill him?’ and discussion of when, where and how, the idea for Death at La Fenice took shape, and was completed over the next four months.

Donna Leon is the crime reviewer for the London Sunday Times and is an opera expert. She has written the libretto for a comic opera, entitled Dona Gallina. Set in a chicken coop, and making use of existing baroque music, Donna Gallina was premiered in Innsbruck. Brigitte Fassbaender, one of the great mezzo-sopranos of our time, and now head of the Landestheater in Innsbruck, agreed to come out of retirement both to direct the opera and to play the part of the witch Azuneris (whose name combines the names of the two great Verdi villainesses Azucena and Amneris).

From AudioFile:

Mystery fans who are looking for a change of scenery and international ambience should get to know Guido Brunetti, commissario of the Venice police. Anna Fields deftly narrates this well-drawn plot of political corruption, murder, and drugs. Fields is at home in the city and canals of Venice. She brings forward the complexities of Brunetti's character, balancing his compassion and idealism with a tough cynicism born of many years experience with the bureaucrats and the powerful of Venice. Fields maintains a good pace for building the framework of clues that fit neatly together in unexpected ways. J.E.M. � AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright � AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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