In late 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice provided the inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees, the story of Richard Cantwell, a war-ravaged American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess. A poignant, bittersweet homage to love that overpowers reason, and to the resilience of the human spirit, Across the...

Confronting a Bronzino portrait in an English country house, a young American heiress comes face to face with her own predicament. For Milly Theale, who seems to have the world before her and at her feet, is fatally ill. Eager for life, eager for love, she embarks on her European adventure, warming to the admiration of her new friends Kate Croy and Merton Densher. But Merton and Kate are secretly engaged, and come to see in this angel with a thumping...

The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies a tall, thin woman approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, an American starlet, and is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot-searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades...

"Environmental concerns become significant in Brunetti's work when an investigator from the Carabiniere, looking into the illegal hauling of garbage, asks for a favor. But the investigator is not the only one with a special request. His father-in-law needs help and a mysterious woman comes into the picture. Brunetti soon finds himself in the middle of an investigation into murder and corruption more dangerous than anything he's seen before."--from...

Dr. Isabel Favor is at her lowest. Her fiance has found someone else, her accountant has run off with her money, and her self-help empire is in shambles. She flees to Italy but disaster lies ahead in the form of actor Lorenzo Gage, Hollywood's favorite villain.

The beating of renowned art historian Dotoressa Brett Lynch draws Commissario Guido Brunetti out of his warm and loving home and into the yearly onslaught of acqua alta, the torrential winter rains. Brett, an American who spearheaded a recent exhibition of Chinese pottery in Venice, lives with her lover, Flavia Petrelli, the reigning diva of La Scala. Brunetti's deliberate and humane investigation to uncover a motive for Brett's beating takes him...

When a friend of Brunetti's brother, a priest recently returned from years of missionary work, calls with a request, Brunetti suspects the man's motives. A new, American-style Protestant sect has begun to meet in the city, and it's possible the priest is merely apprehensive of the competition. But the preacher could also be fleecing his growing flock, so Brunetti and Paola, along with Inspector Vianello and his wife, go undercover.

When Commissario Brunetti is summoned in the middle of the night to the hospital bed of a senior pediatrician, he is confronted with more questions than answers. Three men--a young Carabiniere captain and two privates from out of town--have burst into the doctor's apartment in the middle of the night, attacked him and taken away his eighteenth-month old baby boy. What could have motivated an assault by the forces of the state so violent it has left...

Investigating the lack of a building permit for Commissioner Brunetti's apartment, a young bureaucrat uncovers a frightening secret and promptly dies from an apparently accidental fall; investigating his death in turn, Brunetti is drawn into a world of drugs, loan-sharking, and corruption.

While on holiday, a young couple meets the son of the local gentry and his wife and are drawn by sexual obsession into a nightmare of violence