Willful Behaviour - SPOILER Thread - (Brunetti #11) (Oct/Nov 25)

[Susan]

Welcome to our Oct/Nov 25 buddy read of Willful Behaviour (Guido Brunetti Series #11) by Donna Leon Book 11 in the Commissario Brunetti Mystery series was first published in 2002.

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...

Please feel free to post spoilers in this thread.

[Sandy]

Another excellent book in the series. I was curious why Claudia's mother would be her heir as she, Claudia, left a will, or at least a statement of intent. I was hoping all the artwork would go to charity (after graft took a cut of course).

A minor quibble: Brunetti found the identity of the grandmother by looking for non-Italian names in Claudia's address book. But who would ever identify their grandmother by her last name? She would be a version of 'nana'.

I briefly wondered how the library where Claudia volunteered knew she was dead as no one knew she worked there. I decided it would be through the newspapers. But then it turns out they didn't need the papers to know!

[Susan]

That's a good point, Sandy. Of course, you wouldn't put her name - although she was a kind of step-grandmother, but still. She had very few relatives, so that would be odd.