By its Cover: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery / Donna Leon

US cover

It’s been awhile since I’ve visited the campi, canals, and calli of Venice with Commissario Guido Brunetti. For a long while I was more partial to Aurelio Zen and even read some books by Andrea Camilleri, but I really enjoyed my reunion with Donna Leon in this slim novel. The writing is really good, the story was engaging, and the cultural insights are astute. I felt like I was following alongside Brunetti, drinking in the atmosphere of Venice, and seeing it through the eyes of a native. Granted, Leon is not a native Veneziana, but after thirty years she's as Venetian as any American could hope to be.

UK cover, which I think is so much better

Brunetti is called in to investigate the vandalism and theft of some priceless books at a Venetian Library. The plot thickens when one of the library’s readers turns up murdered. Was it the mysterious American scholar with credentials from a university in Kansas, or someone else?

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Here we are / Graham Swift

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If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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