“The beautiful Umbrian towns of Orvieto and Todi provide the setting for Wagner’s well-written fourth mystery featuring translator Rick Montoya…Wagner skillfully inserts nuggets of local culture without slowing down the narrative pace, and perhaps even more importantly, he gets Italy right. He understands the nuances of Italian manners and mentality as well as the glorious national preoccupation with food.” —Publishers Weekly
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- The Open Boat, and Other Stories
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Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 6/25/19
Formats: Digital Audy
The Open Boat, and Other Stories features four prized selections by Stephen Crane, recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.
“The Open Boat” is based on a harrowing incident in the author’s life: the 1897 sinking of a ship on which he was a passenger; “The Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” reflect Crane’s early travels in Mexico and the American Southwest; and the novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is a galvanizing portrait of life in the slums of New York City.
- The Open Boat, and Other Stories
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Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 6/25/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Return to Umbria
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A Poisoned Pen Press mystery
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 11/01/16
Formats: Digital Audy
Orvieto―its very name brings to mind priceless art, colorful ceramics, and straw-colored wine. And the most famous cathedral façade in Italy, a structure of gothic spires, arches, statues, and mosaics. But as Rick Montoya discovers, this jewel of Umbria can have an ugly side as well.
When Rick Montoya moved to his mother’s Italy from his father’s Santa Fe, New Mexico, to work as a freelance translator using his dual heritage, he didn’t expect to be helping the Italian police. His maternal uncle, a high-level commissioner in Rome, however, sees no reason not to use the resources at hand.
Rick’s fourth investigation should not have involved crime. It begins when Rick is asked by his uncle to go to Orvieto to talk some sense into his cousin Fabrizio, whose fling with an older married woman is embarrassing the family. Rick agrees to give it a try, and plans a short but romantic weekend in Orvieto with Betta Innocenti, the woman he met in Bassano. What could go wrong?
Less than a day after their arrival, his language skills draw him into the brutal murder of an American visitor. He finds that he knows the policeman in charge, but Inspector LoGuercio has changed since the time they met in Volterra. The murdered woman had studied art in Italy decades earlier―why has she returned now? And why was she dumped at night on a dusty road? Through her traveling companions, her devastated daughter and best friend, as well as a growing list of those who knew her from her student days, they realize she had come to Orvieto to face the past. And then a second murder occurs in a public park, with Montoya so close that he wonders if he could have been the intended target. Is all this connected to Fabrizio and his affair, or to the American’s death? More violence erupts, some of it definitely directed at Rick himself.
Strong suspects, tantalizing secrets, concealed motives, and risky behaviors tie to a fascinating landscape and layers of Orvieto’s past.
- Return to Umbria
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A Poisoned Pen Press mystery
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 11/01/16
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Friends in High Places
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 1/01/13
Formats: Digital Audy
In Friends in High Places, Commissario Guido Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat investigating the lack of approval for the building of Brunetti's apartment years before. What began as a red tape headache ends in murder when the bureaucrat is later found dead after a mysterious fall from a scaffold. Brunetti starts an investigation that will take him into the unfamiliar and dangerous areas of drug abuse and loan-sharking, and will reveal, once again, what a difference it makes in Venice to have friends in high places.
- Friends in High Places
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 1/01/13
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Fatal Remedies
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 3/01/12
Formats: Digital Audy
In Fatal Remedies, Brunetti's career is under threat when his professional and personal lives unexpectedly intersect. In the chill of the Venetian dawn, a sudden act of vandalism shatters the quiet of the deserted city, and Brunetti is shocked to find that the culprit waiting to be apprehended at the scene is a member of his own family. Meanwhile, he is also under pressure from his superiors to solve a daring robbery with connections to a suspicious accidental death. Could the two crimes be connected? And will Brunetti be able to prove his family's innocence before it's too late?
- Fatal Remedies
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 3/01/12
Formats: Digital Audy
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- A Sea of Troubles
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 8/01/11
Formats: Digital Audy
Dona Leon has amassed devoted fans around the world for her atmospheric and intelligent Commissario Brunetti series. A Sea of Troubles offers a rare glimpse into the scrupulous Commissario’s personal life. When Brunetti investigates the murder of two local fishermen on the island of Pellestrina, the small community closes ranks, forcing him to accept Signorina Elettra’s offer to visit her relatives there to search for clues. Though loyal to his beloved wife, Paola, he must admit that less-than-platonic emotions underlie his concern for his boss’s beautiful secretary. Suspenseful, provocative, and deeply unsettling, A Sea of Troubles is an explosive and irresistible addition to Leon’s marvelous series.
- A Sea of Troubles
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 8/01/11
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Death and Judgment
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 12/01/09
Formats: Digital Audy
A truck crashes and spills its dangerous cargo on a treacherous road in the Italian Dolomite mountains. Meanwhile, in Santa Lucia, a prominent international lawyer is found dead aboard an intercity train.
Suspecting a connection between the two tragedies, Brunetti digs deep for an answer, stumbling upon a seedy Venetian bar that holds the key to a crime network that reaches far beyond the laguna. But it will take another violent death in Venice before Brunetti and his colleagues begin to understand what is really going on.
- Death and Judgment
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 12/01/09
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Dressed for Death
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 8/01/09
Formats: Digital Audy
Commissario Guido Brunetti's hopes for a refreshing family holiday in the mountains are once again dashed when a gruesome discovery is made in Marghera—a body so badly beaten the face is completely unrecognizable. Brunetti searches Venice for someone who can identify the corpse but is met with a wall of silence. He then receives a telephone call from a contact who promises some tantalizing information. And before night is out, Brunetti is confronting yet another appalling, and apparently senseless, death.
- Dressed for Death
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 8/01/09
Formats: Digital Audy
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- About Face
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 4/03/09
Formats: Digital Audy
Donna Leon’s novels have won her countless fans, heaps of critical acclaim, and a place among the top ranks of international crime writers. Through the warmhearted, perceptive, and principled Commissario Guido Brunetti, Leon’s bestselling books have explored Venice in all its aspects: history, tourism, high culture, food, family, but also violent crime and political corruption.
In About Face, Leon returns to one of her signature subjects: the environment, which has reached a crisis in Italy. Incinerators across the south of Italy are at full capacity, burning who-knows-what and releasing unacceptable levels of dangerous air pollutants, while in Naples, enormous garbage piles grow in the streets. In Venice, with the polluted waters of the canals and a major chemical complex across the lagoon, the issue is never far from the fore.
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.
- About Face
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By Donna Leon
Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 4/03/09
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Glass Bead Game
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Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 10/08/08
Formats: Digital Audy
The final novel of Hermann Hesse, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature
Set in the twenty-third century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).
- The Glass Bead Game
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Read by David Colacci
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Release Date: 10/08/08
Formats: Digital Audy