A wall of silence surrounds a cadet’s death at an elite military academy: “Superb . . . This is an outstanding book.” —Publishers Weekly

Detective Commissario Guido Brunetti has been called to investigate a parent’s worst nightmare. A young cadet has been found hanged, a presumed suicide, in Venice’s elite military academy.

Brunetti’s sorrow for the boy, so close in age to his own son, is rivaled only by his contempt for a community that is more concerned with protecting the reputation of the school, and its privileged students, than understanding this tragedy. The young man is the son of a doctor and former politician—a man of impeccable integrity, all too rare in politics. Dr. Moro is clearly devastated; but while both he and his apparently estranged wife seem convinced that the boy’s death could not have been suicide, neither appears eager to talk to the police or involve Brunetti in any investigation of the circumstances in which he died.