The Golden Egg, Donna Leon
The Golden Egg, Donna Leon
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The Golden Egg

Author: Donna Leon

Narrator: David Rintoul

Unabridged: 8 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/01/2013

Synopsis

Over the years, the bestselling Commissario Guido Brunetti series has conquered the hearts of mystery lovers all over the world. Brunetti is both a perceptive investigator and a principled family man, and through him, Leon has explored Venice in all its aspects: its history, beauty, food, and social life, but also its crime and corruption. In The Golden Egg, as the first leaves of autumn begin to fall, Vice Questore Patta asks Brunetti to look into a minor violation committed by the mayor's future daughter-in-law. Brunetti has no interest in helping his boss amass political favors, but he has little choice but to comply. Then Brunetti's wife, Paola, comes to him with a request of her own. The mentally handicapped man who worked at their dry cleaners has just died of a sleeping pill overdose, and Paola loathes the idea that he lived and died without anyone noticing him, or helping him. To please his wife, Brunetti investigates the death, and is surprised to find nothing on the man: no birth certificate, no passport, no driver's license, no credit cards. As far as the Italian government is concerned, he never existed. And yet, there is the body. As secrets unravel, Brunetti suspects an aristocratic family might be somehow connected to the death. But why would anyone want this sweet, simple-minded man dead?

About Donna Leon

American author, Donna Leon, has settled nicely into a series of crime novels set in Venice, Italy entitled, Brunettixote. The novels feature the fictional character of Commissario Guido Brunetti.

Leon was born in 1942, and eventually lived in Venice, Italy for over 30 years. She was an English literature lecturer for the University of Maryland in Europe (Italy), and worked on a military base in Italy for several years, before she became a full time writer. She moved to Zurich, Switzerland, and also had a home in a smaller Swiss village.

The novels have been translated from English into several foreign languages, but for some reason the author did not approve them being translated into Italian. German television has shown 22 Commissario Brunetti episodes that they produced for broadcast.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Joyce on June 13, 2013

This may be Leon's darkest crime novel yet. They're all pretty bleak, as corruption in the government at least, is rife. But this is disturbing on a more personal level for Brunetti and for readers--the crime involves human cruelty that is more chilling than one that involves graphically described v......more

Goodreads review by Blair on April 22, 2013

Let me begin by saying that Donna Leon is incapable of writing a bad book. This book is well worth reading. That being said, it is not up to the standard of her other books featuring Venetian Comissario Guido Brunetti. Both the depiction of the characters and the plot itself are a shadow of Leon’s u......more

Goodreads review by Alex on December 07, 2022

People stopped talking, people knew nothing, people forgot. Let officialdom be represented in the form of the police, and forgetting quickly turned into total amnesia. In this recent addition to an excellent series centred on Venice police commissario Guido Brunetti, his wife Paola alerts him to the......more

Goodreads review by Pamela on May 20, 2013

Like many of the reviewers here, I LOVE Donna Leon's books, and I'm especially fond of Commissario Guido Brunetti. The author is not just a writer of mysteries; I would say her books are literary fiction structured around a mystery with lots to tell us about life. (Louise Penny is another "mystery"......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth (Alaska) on November 05, 2024

Davide Cavanella, 40-ish, was found dead of an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Davide was known throughout the neighborhood as the deaf and retarded man who "worked" at the cleaners. Worked is not quite accurate as the women allowed him to do things there, but he was not truly employed. Our fri......more

Quotes

“David Rintoul has a smooth, assured English voice, and his Italian pronunciations are convincing and Italian accents kept to a minimum. The listener longs to join him as Brunetti, punctuating numerous vaporetto journeys with glasses of white wine, coffees, and panini.” AudioFile

“[Readers] will savor the pleasures of dialogue as elliptical in its way as Henry James and a retrospective shock when they finally appreciate the import of the tale’s unobtrusive opening scene and its sly title.” Kirkus Reviews

Awards

  • BookPage Book of the Day
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