When Commissario Guido Brunetti gets an early morning phone call that a sudden act of vandalism has just been committed, he soon discovers that the perpetrator is no petty criminal, but Paola Brunetti, his wife.

When the body of man is found in a canal, damaged by the tides, carrying no wallet, and wearing only one shoe, Brunetti has little to work with. No local has filed a missing-person report, and no hotel guests have disappeared. Where was the crime scene? And how can Brunetti identify the man when he can't show pictures of his face? The autopsy shows a way forward: it turns out the man was suffering from a rare, disfiguring disease. With Inspector Vianello,...

At the request of his wife, Commissario Brunetti looks into the death of a deaf, mentally disabled man who worked at their dry-cleaners and uncovers a mystery when the man left no official records and his mother is reluctant to speak to him.

In a mystery that offers an unexpected take on life in contemporary Venice, Commissario Guido Brunetti plunges into the Venetian underworld of illegal African immigrants as he investigates after a street vendor is killed in a scuffle.

Investigating the thefts of rare book pages from a prestigious Venetian library, Commissario Guido Brunetti is stymied by numerous possible suspects and the murder of a seemingly harmless theologian.