Wilful Behaviour - Donna Leon

The eleventh Commissario Brunetti novel, from 2001, is a doozy.  The blurb on the back had me worried: "buried secrets dating back to the Second World War" raised the prospect of awkward flashbacks, a sure sign of mid-series flag.  But no, not by any means.  Leon gets through the entire complex back story without a single flashback.  In fact the writing here is a fine as I have seen from her.  I particularly loved the resonant delicacy of the last line.

Venice really came alive for me in this one and I actually learned stuff about what the Italians got up to in WW2 and the attitude of later generations.

Wilful Behaviour is a crummy title by any standard but the book reawakened my enthusiasm for the Brunetti series.  Strongly recommended.

Blood from a Stone - Donna Leon

Another Venetian mystery for Commissario Brunetti and Signorina Elettra to solve, this one from 2005.  Vu cumpra have become an accepted part of the scene - immigrants from Senegal, mainly, mostly illegal, flogging counterfeit Prada to the foreign tourists.  But one evening two men seem to take marked exception to one of the illicit traders.  In fact, they shoot him dead in front of a group of elderly American doctors.  It's a professional hit, silencers and all.  An awful lot of effort and expense, surely, for an illegal?

The clue is in the title, a bit too obvious for my liking.  But I love Leon's characters and style, and I especially like the way she is not so mechanical as to wrap up every loose end.  Indeed, in this one nothing is really wrapped up.  We discover the motive - in Leon's expert hands, a revelation every bit as shocking as the deus ex machina of an Agatha Christie - but are left no wiser as to who the man with the hairy hands was or even the victim.

A Question of Belief - Donna Leon

A Question of Belief is the 19th Commissario Brunetti novel but the first to swim into my ken.  It is very different to much contemporary Eurocrime - there is nothing noir about it, nor is it particularly a police procedural.  It certainly isn't a thriller - we're virtually a third of the way through before anybody dies.  Yet it is compelling, the compulsion to continue arising from the recognition that you are in the presence of extremely developed characters created by a writer utterly immersed in her world.

In some senses it is old fashioned, certainly more Wallander than Harry Hole.  Venice is baking in the summer heat.  Everybody at the Questura is either on holiday already or imminently about to go on holiday.  Ispettore Vianello is worried about his aunt who has fallen under the thrall of a dodgy fortune-teller.  Toni Brusca from the Commune has uncovered worrying procedural errors at the Tribunale de Vezetia.  Cases are being ludicrously and unnecessarily delayed.  One name keeps appearing on the court documents, the usher Araldo Fortuna, a career civil servant well on his way to retirement who leaves quietly at home with his mother.  Then Fortuna is found dead, his head bashed in and semen in his rectum.  Holidays abandoned, Brunetti, Vianello and the indispensable Signorina Elettra investigate.

The plotting is so defly done it pretty much constitutes slieght of hand.  There is never a hint of the manipulation you so often get with traditional detective fiction.

I shall certainly be investigating others in the series.