Wilful Behaviour [Paperback]

Amazingly, Wilful Behaviour is Donna Leon's 11th novel featuring Commisario Guido Brunetti, and there's not a trace of the repetition or autopilot plotting that seems to kick in on so many long-running series. Set in Venice once more (US expat Leon's home patch), Brunetti's life is made even more difficult than in such illustrious previous outings as Friends in High Places.

An extraordinary art collection owned by an elderly Austrian woman is kept, rather rashly, in her flat. When she is discovered dead, the case lands in Brunetti's lap, and Leon's sardonic copper soon discovers secrets involving collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews during the war. The brick wall he encounters seems impregnable--very few people are happy to talk about what they know. But this time his wife Paola becomes involved. One of her students tells Brunetti about a crime committed by her grandfather who died in a mental home after escaping prison, then the girl is savagely stabbed to death What is her connection with the murdered Austrian woman with and her art collection? Brunetti gets closer to a labyrinthine plot that cuts across every level of Venetian society.

Brunetti remains one of the most persuasively characterised protagonists in crime fiction, and it's nice to see Paola Brunetti move centre stage in this one--she's a winning character. Donna Leon's authoritatively written novels combine machine-tooled plotting with her customarily vivid Italian locations. Living in Venice for over 20 years has given Leon a finger-tip knowledge of her locale, and she's unbeatable at conjuring up La Serenissima. But these are detective novels that don't merely utilise Venice as an exotic backdrop for mysteries and bloodletting; we are given brilliantly observed vignettes of workaday Venice as well. Wilful Behaviour may be slower exerting its grip than earlier Brunettis, but Leon's inexorable skills soon have us gripped quite as comprehensively as ever. --Barry Forshaw --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

‘Brunetti is hard to beat… Leon’s tenth novel more than maintains the standard of its predecessors…’ --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The most powerful novel yet from Donna Leon, as the murder of a young girl involves Commissario Brunetti in secrets dating back to World War II. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The most powerful novel yet from Donna Leon, as the murder of a young girl involves Commissario Brunetti in secrets dating back to WWII.

When one of his wife's Paola's students comes to visit him, with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago, Commissario Brunetti thinks little of it. But when the girl is found dead, clearly stabbed to death, Claudia Leonardo suddenly becomes Brunetti's case, no longer Paola's student. Claudia seems to have no discernible living family - her only familial relationship is with an elderly Austrian woman, who was the lover of her grandfather, but was not herself Claudia's grandmother. Brunetti is both intrigued and stunned by the extraordinary art collection the old woman keeps in her small, unprepossessing flat, and when she in turn is found dead, the case seems to have be about to open up long buried secrets of collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews during the war, secrets few in Italy are happy to explore- (20020917)

The most powerful novel yet from Donna Leon, as the murder of a young girl involves Commissario Brunetti in secrets dating back to WWII. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Donna Leon has lived and taught English literature in Switzerland, Iran, China, Italy and Saudi Arabia. She now lives in Venice and is the Sunday Times crime reviewer. (20020917)

The explosion came at breakfast. Brunetti's position as a commissario of police, though it made the possibility of explosion more likely than it would be for the average citizen, did not make the setting any less strange. The location, however, was related to Brunetti's personal situation as the husband of a woman of incandescent, if inconsistent, views and politics, not to his profession.
'Why do we bother to read this disgusting piece of garbage?' Paola exploded, slamming a folded copy of the day's Gazzettino angrily on to the breakfast table, where it upset the sugar bowl.
Brunetti leaned forward, pushed the edge of the paper aside with his forefinger and righted the bowl. He picked up a second brioche and took a bite, knowing that clarification would follow.
'Listen to this,' Paola said, picking up the paper and reading from the headline of the leading article on the front page: '"Fulvia Prato Recounts her Terrible Ordeal."' Like all of Italy, Brunetti was familiar with Fulvia Prato, the wife of a wealthy Florentine industrialist, who had been kidnapped thirteen months before and kept in a cellar for that entire time by her kidnappers. Freed by the Carabinieri two weeks before, she had spoken to the press for the first time the previous day. He had no idea what Paola could find especially offensive in the headline.
'And this,' she said, turning the paper to the bottom of page five. '"EU Minister Confesses to Sexual Harassment in Her Former Workplace."' Brunetti was familiar with this case, as well: a female commissioner on the European Commission, he couldn't remember what her exact position was - one of those trivial ones they give to women - had yesterday said at a press conference that she had been the victim of sexual aggression twenty years ago when she worked in a firm of civil engineers.
A man who had learned patience in his more than twenty years of married life, Brunetti awaited Paola's explanation. 'Can you believe they'd use that word? Signora Prato did not have to confess to having been the victim of kidnapping, but this poor woman confessed to having been the victim of some sort of sexual attack. And how typical of these troglodytes,' she said with a vicious jab at the paper, 'not to explain what happened, only to say that it was sexual. God, I don't know why we bother to read it.'
'It is hard to believe, isn't it?' Brunetti agreed, himself genuinely shocked by the use of the word and more shocked that he had not registered its dissonance until Paola pointed it out to him.
Years ago, he had begun to make gentle fun of what he then dubbed her 'coffee sermons', the fulminations with which she greeted her reading of the morning papers, but over the years he had come to see that there was great sense in seeming madness.
'Have you ever had to deal with this sort of thing?' she asked him. She held the bottom half of the paper towards him, so he knew she was not referring to the kidnapping.
'Once, years ago.'
'Where?'
'In Naples. When I was assigned there.'
'What happened?'
'A woman came in to report that she had been raped. She wanted to make an official denuncia.' He paused, letting memory return. 'It was her husband.'
Paola's pause was equally long; then she asked, 'And?'
'The questioning was done by the commissario I was assigned to at the time.'
'And?'
'He told her to think about what she was doing, that it would cause her husband a great deal of trouble.'

This time Paola's silence was enough to spur him on.
'After she listened to him, she said she needed time to think about it, and she left.' He could still remember the set of the woman's shoulders as she left the office where the questioning had taken place. 'She never came back.'
Paola sighed, then asked, 'Have things changed much since then?'
'A bit.'
'Are they any better?'
'Minimally. At least we try to have female officers do the first interview.'
'Try?'
'If there are any on duty when it happens, when they come in.'
'And if there aren't?'
'We call around and see if a woman can come on duty.'
'And if not?'
He wondered how breakfast had somehow become an inquisition. 'If not, then they are interviewed by whoever's available.'
'That means, I suppose, that men like Alvise or Lieutenant Scarpa could do the questioning.' She made no attempt to disguise her disgust.
'It's not really questioning, Paola, not like when we have a suspect.'
She pointed at the Gazzettino, her fingernail tapping out a quick triple beat on the second headline. 'In a city where this is possible, I hate to think of what any sort of questioning is like.'
He was just at the point of opposition when she, perhaps sensing this, changed her tone entirely and asked, 'How's your day look? Will you be home for lunch?'
Relieved, aware that he was tempting fate but helpless to stop himself, he answered, 'I think so. Crime seems to be on holiday in Venice.'
'God, I wish I could say the same about my students,' she said with tired resignation.
'Paola, you've only been back at work six days,' he couldn't prevent himself from saying. He wondered how she had managed to monopolize the right to complain about work. After all, he had to deal, if not on a daily basis, then at least with upsetting frequency, with murder, rape and battery, while the worst thing that could happen in her classroom was that someone would ask the identity of the Dark Lady or forget what happened at the end of Washington Square. He was about to say something to this effect when he caught the expression in her eyes.
'What's the matter?' he asked. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.