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Goldsboro Books

9781529154368

A Refiner's Fire

A Refiner's Fire

by Donna Leon

Publisher Hutchinson Heinemann

Genre: Crime

Publication date:

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  • UK First Edition, First Printing


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About the book

Commissario Guido Brunetti returns with a gripping and powerful case about the murkiness of power and a test of loyalties

When two teenage gangs are arrested after clashing violently in one of Venice’s 
campi, the son of a local hero is implicated. But when Commissario Guido Brunetti is asked by a wealthy foreigner to vet this man, Monforte, for a job, he discovers that Monforte might not be such a hero after all.

This seeming contradiction, and a brutal attack on one of Brunetti’s colleagues by a possible gang member, concentrate Brunetti’s attentions. Soon, he discovers the sordid hypocrisy surrounding Monforte’s past, culminating in a fiery meeting of two gangs and a final opportunity for redemption.

A Refiner’s Fire is Donna Leon at her very best: an elegant, sophisticated storyteller whose indelible characters become richer with each book, and who constantly interrogates the ambiguity between moral and legal justice.

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About the Author

Donna Leon

Donna Leon is the American author of a series of crime novels set in Venice, Italy, featuring the fictional hero Commissario Guido Brunetti. In 2003, she received the Corine Literature Prize.


Leon lived in Venice for over 30 years and was a lecturer in English literature for the University of Maryland College, Europe, in Italy and then worked as a professor from 1981 to 1999 at the American military base of Vicenza, Italy. Eventually, she stopped teaching and concentrated on writing and other cultural activities in the field of music.


Her Commissario Brunetti novels all take place in or around Venice. They are written in English and have been translated into many foreign languages, but--at Leon's request--not into Italian. The ninth Brunetti novel, Friends in High Places, won the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger in 2000. German television has produced 22 Commissario Brunetti episodes for broadcast


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