Queen of Crime Fiction Donna Leon Returns

Trace Elements

An evening with Donna Leon 

Thursday 2nd April, 6.30pm

Donna Leon, who was named by The Times as one of the 50 Greatest Crime Writers, returns with her latest book,Trace Elements - the twenty-ninth instalment in the highly acclaimed, internationally bestselling Commissario Guido Brunetti series of books, where a woman's cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Brunetti to uncover a threat to the entire region. 

Once again, Donna's memorable characters and storytelling skills engage our sensibilities as to the differences between guilt and responsibility.

Donna will be in conversation with Jim Kelly, author of The Mathematical Bridge. 

Tickets are £7 in advance and can be bought here.

Trace Elements by Donna Leon Published by Cornerstone. Out 5 March 2020.

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.