This new audio of Leon’s book six in her series about Commissario Guido Brunetti, published in the US in 1998, pits the Venice police detective against the Opus Dei, a powerful far-right group within the Catholic Church. Dan Brown would later use a member’s homicidal fanaticism to launch The Da Vinci Code into bestsellerdom. Here, while investigating a claim of suspicious deaths in a religious nursing home, nearly everyone Brunetti meets—priests, nuns, even his own boss—seems to belong to the secret organization. This means trouble for him and even more for the whistleblower, a former nun who used to care for the detective’s ailing mother. Though the procedural aspects are more predictable than other entries in the series, the shrewd, honorable and determined Brunetti is as charming and likable as always, circumventing a dictatorial, incompetent superior while, at home, enjoying the company of a loving wife and believable adolescent children. The American-born Leon, who lived in Venice for three decades before moving to Switzerland, combines the best aspects of two subgenres of crime novels into a winning cozy-noir mix. David Colacci, a popular, versatile reader, has no difficulty following the author’s purposely shifting atmospheres or building on her dimensional images of the characters. His Italian accents seem impeccable, providing Brunetti with a sort of old world cordiality and his boss with sinister guile hiding behind booming pomposity. The former nun speaks softly with concern about the lately departed, and the detective’s wife, Paola, sounds intelligent, witty, and well-tuned to her husband’s moods. The novel has a whodunit element and Colacci’s enactment of the murderer’s reaction to exposure and failure is truly chilling.