I sort of snapped," she says, explaining that she retreated to the mountains after realising "that the boats were always crowded, that the main streets were impassable, and that I arrived home in a bad mood after being out". It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for. His question met a long pause, then people began to look around them: who would be the one to present himself? A large part of the appeal of Leon's books lies in the fact that her principal characters are so charming, and lead such nice lives. He had watched intently as the body was rolled into the operating theater, stared fascinated as the white sheet was pulled back from her nearly perfect body.

for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab. In Death at La Fenice, the career of a world-famous conductor with a Nazi past ends abruptly – between acts two and three of La Traviata – when he drinks a cup of coffee laced with cyanide. With the money earned from her books, she has supported two European opera orchestras, Il Complesso Barocco and Il Pomo d'Oro.Growing up in New Jersey, Leon was the kind of conscientious kid who finished her homework before she went out to play (as an author, she delivers manuscripts on time or even early). but none so horrific and violent as that of world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, who was poisoned during a performance of La Traviata. Before the hum could rise to drown him out, he asked, voice insistently calm,”Is there a doctor in the audience? Anschließend arbeitete sie als Reisebegleiterin in Rom, als Werbetexterin in London und unterrichtete später an amerikanischen Schulen in der Schweiz, im Iran, in China und in Saudi-Arabien, wo sie wegen der Weigerung, sich bei ihrer Lehrtätigkeit zu verschleiern, nicht mehr arbeiten durfte.

In Venice, she is regularly bailed up by people in the grip of Brunettimania, many of them from German-speaking countries ("The centre of the cult is Austria," she says).Der melancholische Polizist und Sympathieträger Guido Brunetti leidet darunter, das Böse nicht aus der Welt schaffen zu können. Brunetti’s own character is made clear to the reader throughout the course of the novel; he is a family man who is extremely good at his job, preferring to investigate motive through looking at human dynamics and understanding each suspect, rather than relying on intuition.

Leon's fine 20th Commisario Guido Brunetti mystery (after 2010's A Question of Belief) explores violence against women and the treatment of the elderly.

The investigating officer, Guido Brunetti, Vice-Commissario of the Venice Police, brings to his first case tact, persistence, and a useful sympathy with young women—which becomes suddenly pertinent when he unearths Wellauer's prewar involvement with a family of three star-crossed girls. Millions of them arrive each year, surging in eager waves into Piazza San Marco, swarming through the Doge's Palace, squeezing onto the water-buses, known as vaporetti, that ply the Grand Canal. From the first gallery, there came a burst of coughing; someone dropped a book, perhaps a purse; but the door to the corridor behind the orchestra pit remained dosed.