Why a Booktrail?
1990s – In Venice, can there be justice for crimes of the past?
Wilful Behaviour ( Brunetti 11)
What you need to know before your trail
Commissario Brunetti receives a visit from one of his wife’s students. Claudia is interested in investigating the possibility that her grandfather may be pardoned for a crime he committed years earlier.
Brunetti thinks not much of it putting it down to a woman’s interest in her family. But when the Claudia is later found murdered, he sits up and takes notice.
Claudia had no family but lived with an elderly Austrian woman – with a rather impressive and unusual art collection dating back from before the war.
When this elderly lady is then found murdered, the case explodes and unearths some very dark truths indeed.
Travel Guide
Ah Venice. From the island of Pellestrina where we were in the last novel, here we are back in the city of Brunetti and back to his usual haunts.
Paola, Brunetti’s wife is teaching her students the joys of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and its one of these student comes to Brunetti for help with something her grandfather did years earlier.
And so Venice becomes the setting for an investigation into Italy’s role in the the Second World War .Like any city, Venice has its secrets and things in the past it would rather not be true but there are elements of the second world war that just might warrant murder in some eyes.
Venice over the years since the war has of course changed -and those who collected paintings and artworks might now have to explain where they came from. When two people are murdered, then the past really has to come to the fore and be examined, however painful it might be.
Venice still is a city of contrasts and conflicting positions –
“The Madonna had once saved the city from plague, and now there was a church. The Americans had saved the country from the Germans, and now there was a McDonald’s.”
Just what role did some italians play during the war and how is this impacting on the present?
Widespread profiteering, a misappropriation of art, and many many skeletons in even more cupboards.
An Italy looking back at itself and questioning its past.
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