There are five 2017 calendars on my walls of which this is the most recently acquired.  The title page of this lovely calendar is a view of Burano taken by my friends whose passion is the adventures of Donna Leon's Venetian detective Commissario Brunetti.

More particularly it is the tracing of all the places in Venice associated with those adventures.  They have produced a beautiful map showing many of the locations and have published several guidebooks to Brunetti's Venice with a new one coming out next year.  They are all aimed at the German market because although Donna Leon's books have a following in many countries the Germans are top fans thanks to highly popular TV adaptations.  (Sub-titled DVDs are available in the US.)

Each of the twelve months has a picture of a Brunetti related place and a brief legend which with the help of a dictionary to augment my limited German I hope to translate month by month.  I made sense of January once I realised that I had looked up verschleißen (worn out) instead of verschließen (locked).   How you arrange your "i"s and your "e"s is at least as important in German as it is in English. 

I spent the weekend with another foreign detective, one that I had heard of but never seen.  I was given a boxset of The Killing for Christmas.  That's five DVDs with four episodes of compulsive viewing on each.  So I found myself at midnight and later with Sarah Lund swearing I would just watch one more episode and then go to bed.