A Question of Belief, A - Softcover

Leon, Donna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0434020214 ISBN 13: 9780434020218

Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd, 2010

Synopsis

Commissario Guido Brunetti must contend with ingenious corruption, bureaucratic intransigence, and the stifling heat of a Venetian summer. As he plans a trip to the mountains with his family, he learns that cases at the local court--hardly known as a model of efficiency--are being delayed to the benefit of one of the parties. A creative new trick for corrupting the system, perhaps, but what can Brunetti do about it? Just when it looks like he will be able to get away, a shocking, violent crime forces him to stay in Venice.

About this title

About the Author

Donna Leon has written four previous Guido Brunetti novels, Death and Judgment, Dressed for Death, Death in a Strange Country, and Death at La Fenice, which won the Suntory Prize for the best suspense novel of 1991. She teaches English at the University of Maryland extension at a U.S. Air Force base near Venice Italy, where she has lived for over twenty years.

David Colacci has been an actor and a director for over thirty years, and has worked as a narrator for over fifteen years. He has won AudioFile Earphones Awards, earned Audie nominations, and been included in Best of Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0434020214
• ISBN 13: 9780434020218
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 262