The Golden Egg: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery (The Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries, 22) - Hardcover

Leon, Donna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802121012 ISBN 13: 9780802121011

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013

Synopsis

In The Golden Egg, as the first leaves of autumn begin to fall, Vice Questore Patta asks Brunetti to look into a minor shop-keeping violation committed by the mayor’s future daughter-in-law. Brunetti has no interest in helping his boss amass political favors, but he has little choice but to comply. Then Brunetti’s wife, Paola, comes to him with a request of her own. The mentally handicapped man who worked at their dry cleaner has just died of a sleeping pill overdose, and Paola loathes the idea that he lived and died without anyone noticing him, or helping him.

Brunetti begins to investigate the death and is surprised when he finds nothing on the man: no birth certificate, no passport, no driver’s license, no credit cards. As far as the Italian government is concerned, he never existed. Stranger still, the dead man’s mother refuses to speak to the police, and assures Brunetti that her son’s identification papers were stolen in a burglary. As secrets unravel, Brunetti suspects that the Lembos, an aristocratic family, might be somehow connected to the death. But why would anyone want this sweet, simple-minded man dead?

About this title

About the Author

Donna Leon is the author of the internationally bestselling Commissario Guido Brunetti series. The winner of the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, among other awards, Leon was born in New Jersey and has lived in Venice for thirty years.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* It isn’t so much crime itself that intrigues Venetian police commissario Guido Brunetti as it is the hidden stories behind the crime, or lurking on its edges. So it is again in this twenty-second Brunetti novel. At the urging of his wife, Paola, Brunetti investigates the death of a mentally handicapped man who worked at the family’s dry cleaners. Did he really die of a sleeping-pill overdose? And why are there no official records indicating that the victim even existed? As Brunetti digs into the matter, he finds himself less bothered by the circumstances of the man’s death than by the fact “that he managed to live for 40 years without leaving any bureaucratic traces.” Others would see only a mildly curious anomaly in the man’s lack of a human footprint across a lifetime; Brunetti sees “mystery and sadness,” and it prompts him to keep digging. What he finds is a saga of appalling human cruelty, but one that eludes the penal code. In stark contrast to the tyranny of silence that shrouded the forgotten man’s life is the outpouring of language and love that encircles the Brunetti family dinner table. In the end, this novel is a celebration of the humanizing power of words. “At one point,” Leon says, describing the dinnertime conversation, “Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty and intellectual complexity of it.” Name another crime novel that ends like that. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Leon’s success—well more than one million copies in print in North America; a devoted library following—is testament to the heartening fact that character counts in crime fiction. --Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0802121012
• ISBN 13: 9780802121011
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256