Icy chills from the past

Admirers of Donna Leon's Venetian crime novels will be well acquainted with Commissario Brunetti's wife Paola, who lectures on English literature at the university. The daughter of the powerful and enigmatic Count Orazio Falier, she is very much a character in her own right. As deft a skillet-wielder as Madame Maigret, she is far more independent, with political views which are a long way to the left of Brunetti - did she not open an earlier book by hurling a brick through the window of a travel agency to demonstrate her dislike of its operations?

After giving a class to her students on the concept of honour in Edith Wharton's novels (an incomprehensible idea to most of them), she is accosted by a pupil, Claudia Leonardo (who, it turns out, does know what honour is) with a strange request: can the Professoressa ask Brunetti whether it's possible to obtain a pardon for her grandfather who, convicted of a crime but declared insane, died in the San Servolo lunatic asylum.

Though Brunetti finds her attractive and impressively intelligent, he's unable to help her; which, when she's stabbed to death in her apartment, makes him all the more resolved to find her murderer. It's an investigation that takes him far back into the past, to the time of Mussolini, when Italian Jews were being shamelessly and systematically fleeced of their art treasures.

Donna Leon's novels have successively become more subtle, more complex and perhaps more serious, without ever losing their compelling power as narratives. This is especially true of Wilful Behaviour: the story is wholly engrossing, yet at the same time the sub-text, highly relevant to the present, is a grim one: Italy, the author believes, has never fully confronted its Fascist past.