GOLDEN EGG, THE - Softcover

Donna Leon has lived in Venice for thirty years and previously lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China, where she worked as a teacher. Her novels featuring Commissario Brunetti have all been highly acclaimed, including Friends in High Places, which won the CWA Silver Dagger for Fiction.

*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