By day Donna Leon writes detective novels – 12 so far – and succesful thrillers at that. Successful enough, anyway, to fund her true passion, running a baroque opera company. By night she runs an opera company, largely funded from her life of crime. Not many of her readers know this, but it won’t surprise them. Opera seeps into her books – their plots, their atmosphere – like dripping blood. Each one comes prefaced by a few lines of Mozartian libretto – usually from Cosi fan tutte, which for some reason seems to lend itself to the mechanics of murder-mystery even though it’s an opera in which no one actually dies.”