Granted leave from the Questura, Commissario Guido Brunetti decides to finally take a well-earned break and visit Sant'Erasmo, one of the largest islands in the Venetian laguna.
When a body is found floating in a canal, strangely disfigured and with multiple stab wounds, Commissario Brunetti is called to investigate and is convinced he recognises the man from somewhere.
He's charmed - perhaps too charmed, suggests his wife Paola - by her love of Virgil and Cicero, but shocked by her appearance. He believes the man's death is connected to the illegal transportation of refuse - and more sinister material - in his company's trucks.
When Commissario Brunetti is summoned to the hospital bedside of a senior paediatrician whose skull has been brutally fractured, he is confronted with more questions than answers.
When one of his wife Paola's students comes to visit him, with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago, Commissario Brunetti thinks little of it, beyond being intrigued and attracted by the girl's intelligence and moral seriousness.
When Commissario Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat investigating the lack of official approval for the building of his apartment years before, his first reaction, like any other Venetian, is to think of whom he knows who might bring pressure to bear on the relevant local government department.
The murder of two clam fishermen off the island of Pellestrina, south of the Lido on the Venetian lagoon, draws Commissario Brunetti into the close-knit community of the island, bound together by a code of loyalty and a suspicion of outsiders worthy of the Mafia.
When a wealthy Venetian woman is found brutally murdered, the prime suspect is her Romanian maid, who has fled the city. Commissario Brunetti decides - unofficially - to take on the case himself.
On a cold Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a man is killed in a scuffle in Campo San Stefano. As Brunetti starts to investigate the murky subculture of the Venetian underworld, he discovers that life is cheap in the immigrant community and something of much greater value is at stake.
As Commissario Guido Brunetti watches his mother buried, he takes some solace in the cloud dappled sky, and the tops of the Venretian cypress trees, moving gently in the spring breeze.
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