An accident involving the father of a boy suspected of doing drugs finds Commissario Guido Brunetti pursuing a series of false and contradictory leads before uncovering a long-standing scam and unleashing unintentional consequences.

"Discovered floating in a basket along the canals of Venice, Sebastien Trovato wrestles with questions of his origins. Decades later, on an assignment to translate a rare book, Daniel Goodman finds himself embroiled in a web of secrets carefully kept within the ancient city and in the mystery of the man whose story the book does not finish: Sebastien"--

Going undercover to investigate a new Protestant sect that has begun meeting in Venice, Commissario Guido Brunetti is forced to put his probe aside when the body of a young gypsy girl turns up in a local canal.

At the request of his wife, Commissario Brunetti looks into the death of deaf, mentally disabled man who worked at their dry-cleaners and uncovers a mystery when the man left no official records and his mother is reluctant to speak to him.

Venetian police captain Kat Tapo investigates an eerie ritualistic murder with ties to a Cold War cover-up and a malevolent Internet virus.

Count Falier was urging his Venetian son-in-law to investigate, and preferably intervene in, the seemingly innocent plan of the Count's best friend, the elderly Gonzalo Rodríguez de Tejada, to adopt a much younger man as his son. Under Italian inheritance laws this man would then be heir to Gonzalo's entire fortune, a prospect Gonzalo's friends find appalling. For his part, Brunetti wonders why the old man, a close family friend, can't be allowed...

Television news war correspondent Bill Fitzgerald travels to Venice seeking some much-needed rest and relaxation. There he is thunderstruck by the dark beauty of Vanessa Stewart. Painfully, unhappily married, Vanessa welcomes a no-strings relationship with Bill--a friendship that soon transforms into an intense and desperate love.

Cop-turned-lawyer-and-investigator Stone Barrington finds himself smack in the middle of a romantic holiday in Venice, but a frantic phone call half a world away cuts it short. A celebrity murder has L.A. in an uproar, and it mysteriously threatens Stone's former flame, Arrington Calder. Once he arrives, Stone must plumb the depths of film society to nab the killer.