mom-approved: Donna Leon

Yesterday I ran straight from work to the public library on an errand for my mom. Lately she's been stuck at home in pain with limited mobility because of a herniated disc in her back or something along those lines. Now, my mom is a voracious reader. Her favorite genres are historical fiction and mysteries, though like me she reads broadly across most fiction genres and appreciates the occasional nonfiction title when it relates to long-term or of-the-moment interests. However, right now she's only interested in reading books from one particular author: Donna Leon. Two of the Donna Leon books she requested from one of our library system's other branches had come in and I needed to collect them before the library closed at 6 pm.

She's working her way (possibly nonsequentially) through the books in Leon's Guido Brunetti series of mysteries set in Venice. So far there are 23 titles in the series:

1. Death At La Fenice (1992)
2. Death in a Strange Country (1993)
3. The Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death (1994)
4. A Venetian Reckoning aka Death And Judgment (1995)
5. Acqua Alta aka Death in High Water (1996)
6. The Death of Faith aka Quietly in Their Sleep (1997)
7. A Noble Radiance (1997)
8. Fatal Remedies (1998)
9. Friends in High Places (1999)
10. A Sea of Troubles (2001)
11. Willful Behavior (2002)
12. Uniform Justice (2003)

13. Doctored Evidence (2004)
14. Blood from a Stone (2005)
15. Through a Glass Darkly (2006)
16. Suffer the Little Children (2007)
17. The Girl of His Dreams (2008)
18. About Face (2009)
19. A Question of Belief (2010)
20. Drawing Conclusions (2011)
21. Beastly Things (2012)
22. The Golden Egg (2013)
23. By Its Cover (2014)

Leon has also published a stand-alone novel, The Jewels of Paradise (2012), which is also set in Venice.

I'm pretty sure that I have a copy of Acqua Alta kicking around here, in turn I am pretty sure that I got it from my mom and that she picked it up as vacation reading. When I figure out where I put the book (if indeed I am remembering this all correctly), I'll read it and see whether I find the series as exciting as my mom does.