A woman’s cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Guido Brunetti to uncov er a threat to the entire region in Donna Leon’s haunting twenty-ninth Brunetti novel.When Dottoressa Donato calls the Questura to report that a dying patie nt at the hospice Fatebenefratelli wants to speak to the police, Commissario Gui do Brunetti and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, waste no time in responding.‘ They killed him. It was bad money. I told him no’, Benedetta Toso gasps the word s about her recently-deceased husband, Vittorio Fadalto. Even though he is not s ure she can hear him Brunetti softly promises he and Griffoni will look into wha t initially appears to be a private family tragedy. They discover that Fadalto w orked in the field collecting samples of contamination for a company that measur es the cleanliness of Venice’s water supply and that he had died in a mysterious motorcycle accident. Distracted briefly by Vice Questore Patta’s obsession with youth crime in Venice, Brunetti is bolstered once more by the remarkable resear ch skills of Patta’s secretary, Signora Elettra Zorzi. Piecing together the tang led threads, in time Brunetti comes to realize the perilous meaning in the woman ’s accusation and the threat it reveals to the health of the entire region. But justice in this case proves to be ambiguous, as Brunetti is reminded it can be w hen, seeking solace, he reads Aeschylus’s classic playThe Eumenides.As she has done so often through her memorable characters and storytelling skill, Donn a Leon once again engages our sensibilities as to the differences between guilt and responsibility.