Early one morning Guido Brunetti, commissario of the Venetian police, confronts a grisly sight when the body of a young man is fished out of the fetid Venetian canal. All the clues point to a violent mugging, but for Brunetti robbery seems altogether too convenient a motive. Then something very incriminating is discovered in the dead man's flat, something which points to the existence of a high level cabal - and Brunetti becomes convinced that somebody, somewhere, is taking great pains to provide a ready-made solution to the crime...In the second of Donna Leon's award-winning Commissario Brunetti novels, Brunetti is as fallibly human - and Venice as mysteriously beautiful - as Donna Leon's many loyal readers have become to expect.