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Donna Leon was recently named one of the 50 greatest crime writers by The Times. Here she discusses her latest novel Beastly Things and her life of writing and contribution to crime fiction with the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University Professor Janet Beer.

Beastly Things is the latest novel in a series set in Italy and featuring Commissario Brunetti. The Commissario recognises a dead body found floating in a canal from a farmers’ protest, but there is no identification on the body. The trail leads to a slaughterhouse, as the novel explores the dark side of Italy’s meat industry.

Leon has lived in Venice for 30 years. Her previous Brunetti novels include Friends in High Places, which won the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction.

Beer has researched widely late 19th- and early 20th-century American literature and culture and contemporary Canadian women’s writing. She recently completed a study of the late writing of Edith Wharton.