Barry Zalben's Favorites

"What role can or should loyalty play in the life of a police inspector? It's a question Commissario Guido Brunetti must face and ultimately answer in Give unto Others, Donna Leon's splendid thirty-first installment of her acclaimed Venetian crime series. Brunetti is approached for a favor by Elisabetta Foscarini, a woman he knows casually, but her mother was good to Brunetti's mother, so he feels obliged to at least look into the matter privately,...

"From a renowned surgeon and historian with five decades of experience comes a remarkable history of surgery's development-spanning the Stone Age to the present day-blending meticulous medical studies with lively and skillful storytelling. There are not many events in life that can be as simultaneously life-frightening and life-saving as a surgical operation. Yet, in America, tens-of-millions of major surgical procedures are performed annually but...

Door County is caught in the grip of a fierce winter storm, and Sheriff Dave Cubiak is asked to check in on an affluent widow. He finds her lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs, clutching a valuable bronze sculpture. It looks like an accidental fall, but something is not adding up. A second body is found later that week when an ice-fishing shack explodes. Could the two deaths be related? - adapted from jacket

"For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through South America in linen suits, keeping two steps ahead of Mossad agents, international police and the world's journalists. In this rigorusly researched factual novel--drawn almost entirely from historical documents--Olivier Guez traces Mengele's footsteps through...