I loved this book because of its Venice setting. Though Donna Leon is an American, she has lived in La Serenissima most of her life. I also loved the main character, Inspector Brunetti, and his wife, Paola. He carries the narrative forward, and we learn a lot about Italian policing.
I was engrossed by the story itself, about the murder by poisoning of a famous conductor at Venice’s historic opera house during a performance of La Traviata. Though he is used to the corruption in Venice, Brunetti is shocked by the number of enemies the conductor has made. It’s a real "Who Dunnit" that kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves crime fiction–and Italy.
'A splendid series . . . with a backdrop of the city so vivid you can almost smell it.' The Sunday Telegraph
Winner of the Suntory Mystery Fiction Grand Prize __________________________________
The twisted maze of Venice's canals has always been shrouded in mystery. Even the celebrated opera house, La Fenice, has seen its share of death ... but none so horrific and violent as that of world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, who was poisoned during a performance of La Traviata. Even Commissario of Police, Guido Brunetti, used to the labyrinthine corruptions of the city, is shocked at the number of…
Another crime thriller, I loved this book because of the main character, William Wisting, a detective in the Norwegian city of Larvik, who has been brilliantly played in the TV series by Sven Nordin. In this novel, Wisting reopens a cold case after receiving a mysterious letter. The original crime took place twenty years earlier, when a young girl, Tone Vaterland, is killed on her way home from work. Her rejected boyfriend, Danny Momrak, is jailed for the murder, but the letter changes everything.
I loved the way Wisting relentlessly follows the trail of the reopened case. I also loved the way his daughter, Lene, a journalist for a local paper, is woven into the story and the Norwegian setting, replete with crisp snow and skiddy roads.
A chilling letter. A wrong conviction. One last chance to find the real killer . . . The chilling and heart-pounding new novel from Norwegian superstar Jorn Lier Horst
INSPIRATION FOR THE HIT BBC FOUR SHOW WISTING
'Up there with the best of the Nordic crime writers' THE TIMES _______
In 1999, seventeen-year-old Tone Vaterland was killed on her way home from work.
Desperate for a conviction the police deemed the investigation an open-and-shut case and sent her spurned boyfriend, Danny Momrak, down for murder.
But twenty years later William Wisting receives a puzzling letter. It suggests the wrong man…
I loved this book because of its larger-than-life main character, Rembrandt van Rijn, the Golden Age Dutch painter who took the world by storm with his bravura artworks, like Night Watch. And who better to write about this great artist than the scholar Simon Schama?
I loved the way he brings Rembrandt to life, weaving into his life story the creation of his great works. I felt it was a bit like reading a Shakespeare tragedy as Rembrandt, once rich and famous, gradually descends towards poverty and loneliness as his marriage to Saskia fails and his debts spiral out of control. I loved the extraordinary detail of Schama’s almost forensic account of the creation of the paintings and his sympathy with the great Dutch artist’s genius and life.
This dazzling, unconventional biography shows us why, more than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt continues to exert such a hold on our imagination. Deeply familiar to us through his enigmatic self-portraits, few facts are known about the Leiden miller's son who tasted brief fame before facing financial ruin (he was even forced to sell his beloved wife Saskia's grave). The true biography of Rembrandt, as Simon Schama demonstrates, is to be discovered in his pictures. Interweaving of seventeenth-century Holland, Schama allows us to see Rembrandt in a completely fresh and original way.
Paris 1940. The City of Light is under Nazi occupation when a spirited young Jewish girl, Annette Zelman, arrives in the French capital from Nancy as a refugee and enrolls at the Academie des Beaux Arts in the Latin Quarter. It is only a stone’s throw from the legendary Café de Flore, and Annette is soon rubbing shoulders with the likes of Picasso, Django Reinhardt, and Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote movingly about Annette’s disappearance.
It was also at the café that she met her beau, a young Catholic poet named Jean Jausion. They fall in love and, despite opposition from their parents, decide to marry. But just after they publish their marriage banns, Annette is arrested by the Gestapo ….
