Trace Elements by Donna Leon

Description

Bibliographic Details

• Author: Donna Leon
• Title: Trace Elements (A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery)
• Publisher: ‎ Atlantic Monthly Press; First Grove Atlantic Edition (March 3, 2020)
• Language: ‎ English
• Format: Hardcover w/Library Binding – 278 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 0802148670
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0802148674
• Item Weight: ‎ 1.30 pounds
• Dimensions: ‎ 6.4 x 1.15 x 9.3 inches
• Book Condition: Used – Very Good (Former library book; may include the markings and stickers associated from the library. May show signs of minor discoloration on page edges). 
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good (Mylar Library Dust Jacket)
• Edition: First Grove Atlantic Edition

Synopsis:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Unto Us a Son is Given, comes one of her most dark and thrilling mysteries yet.

A woman’s cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Guido Brunetti to uncover a threat to the entire region in Donna Leon’s haunting twenty-ninth Brunetti novel.

When Dottoressa Donato calls the Questura to report that a dying patient at the hospice Fatebenefratelli wants to speak to the police, Commissario Guido Brunetti and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, waste no time in responding.

“They killed him. It was bad money. I told him no,” Benedetta Toso gasps the words about her recently-deceased husband, Vittorio Fadalto. Even though he is not sure she can hear him Brunetti softly promises he and Griffoni will look into what initially appears to be a private family tragedy. They discover that Fadalto worked in the field collecting samples of contamination for a company that measures the cleanliness of Venice’s water supply and that he had died in a mysterious motorcycle accident.

Distracted briefly by Vice Questore Patta’s obsession with youth crime in Venice, Brunetti is bolstered once more by the remarkable research skills of Patta’s secretary, Signora Elettra Zorzi. Piecing together the tangled threads, in time Brunetti comes to realize the perilous meaning in the woman’s accusation and the threat it reveals to the health of the entire region.

But justice in this case proves to be ambiguous, as Brunetti is reminded it can be when, seeking solace, he reads Aeschylus’s classic play The Eumenides.

As she has done so often through her memorable characters and storytelling skill, Donna Leon once again engages our sensibilities as to the differences between guilt and responsibility.

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.

Leon has received both the CWA Macallon Silver Dagger for Fiction and the German Corrine Prize for her novels featuring Commisario Guido Brunetti.

She lives in Venice.