The Jewels of Paradise

By: Donna Leon

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

Donna Leon has won heaps of critical praise and legions of fans for her best-selling mystery series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, one of contemporary crime fiction’s most beloved characters. With The Jewels of Paradise, Leon takes listeners beyond the world of the Venetian Questura in her first stand-alone novel.

Caterina Pellegrini is a native Venetian, and like so many of them, she’s had to leave home to pursue her career elsewhere, mostly abroad. With a doctorate in baroque opera from Vienna, she lands in Birmingham, England, as a research fellow and assistant professor. Birmingham, however, is no Venice, so when she gets word of a position back home, Caterina jumps at the opportunity. The job is an unusual one. After nearly three centuries, two locked trunks, believed to contain the papers of a once-famous, now largely forgotten baroque composer, have been discovered. The composer was deeply connected in religious and political circles, but he died childless, and now two Venetian men, descendants of his cousins, each claim inheritance. With rumors of a treasure, they aren’t about to share the possible fortune.

Caterina has been hired to attend the opening of the trunks and examine any enclosed papers to discover the “testamentary disposition” of the composer. But when her research takes her in unexpected directions and a silent man follows her through the streets, she begins to wonder just what secrets these trunks may hold.

©2012 Donna Leon and Diogenes Verlag AG (P)2012 AudioGO

Bring back Guido

What is Venice without Brunetti? This slow narrative isnt up to Leon's standard. I feel that i wasted a credit

What a very great pity

The story is interesting, but unfortunately the reading was unendurable and this listener had to abandon the effort. The narrator's artificial Italian accent in the dialogues was so unpleasantly grating as to be unbearable... a cross between a Russian Italian affectation, if you can imagine such a thing. Perhaps the narrator has good results elsewhere, but not here. What a pity. I do so like Donna Leon's writing.

Not the Donna Leon I know

I’m a big fan of Donna Leon so I had to try this book. First, I listened to an hour of the book. Then I went to other pursuits. Two months later, I tried again and made it all the way by stubborn perseverance. While well written and wonderfully narrated, the story is simply not very interesting. One follows the protagonist’s research about an 18th century composer/prelate of sorts, which I found I didn’t care about. The protagonist’s travails as the hired researcher to go through the papers of the composer are only mildly interesting. I’ll stick with Bruneti.

Let me be blunt

This is a remarkably boring book. I generally enjoy Donna Leon's book, I enjoy slow books, including mysteries, but it's been almost three hours of listening and still little has happened. I don't know that I'll finish it.

Stick to writing about Guido Brunetti!

Donna Leon writes great mysteries, but in this book, she barely had a conflict to investigate, much less one that was engaging. So much time spent in meaningless descriptions of how someone cut the zucchini, stirred the sugar in her coffee, lifted the page evenly and carefully with two hands. I felt like I was reading the assignments from a Write Your First Novel class. And the narrator's beautiful Italianate English began to grate after a while, as if, since there was nothing to say, it was best to stretch out the words as long as possible, and repeat people's names over and over.

Of course I still look forward to the next Brunetti novel, but I hope Ms. Leon sticks with those in the future.

Not a Commissario Brunetti Mystery.

I have read and listened to many of her Commisario Brunetti books and enjoyed them.. This one was not up to the level I was expecting. Barely finished it, but not worth the trouble.

Very disappointing

As a fan of Donna Leon's I feel that this was an indulgence on her part, that should have been killed by her editor. There is only enough material here for a short story, and it is expanded into a book by means of lots of extraneous details which ultimately go for nothing. There are hints of the way in which the story could have been expanded into a fully rounded story about a Venetian family, but it is all thrown away in a plodding, tedious tale of an academic reading through old papers in two trunks. The characters are not well developed. This is a story that goes nowhere. Don't buy it.

Vehicle for her own views

Would you try another book from Donna Leon and/or Cassandra Campbell?

I like Brunetti series

What do you think your next listen will be?

I Hear Sirens in the Street

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

both slow

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

The food described is always good but Leon wrote this as a way of venting her dislike of the Catholic Church and her view of people who believe as fools to be pitied or liars

Any additional comments?

Just too much of Leon's own anti-Catholic rant

A long road to a hasty ending

I know it's a mystery novel but this for me had too many red herrings, too many tangential plots and was not a credible story at all. One irritation was the main character who is supposed to be an academic researcher yet she draws a completely ridiculous conclusion from the "lack of response" to a letter written more than 200 years ago. She presumes that there was no reply because one isn't found in the trunk. What? Neither good detective work nor sound research. She also wonders if the composer she is researching "would have been honored to know me"? Not likely. How egocentric! After meandering down one rabbit hole after another, Leon seems to have been as bored with her story as this reader, as uncertain as to how she is going to bring this all together and suddenly within a few pages concludes with a completely implausible, silly,Da Vinci code ending.

Also, the narrator used a bizarre, gratingly fake "Italian" accent. This affectation along with that of making one syllable works into two - I bailed out of the audio book and switched to reading the hard copy.