BackstageBackstage

In Backstage, Donna reveals her admiration for, and inspiration from, the great crime novelists Ruth Rendell and Ross Macdonald, examining their approach to storytelling as she dissects her favorite books of theirs. She expresses her love for Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and her appreciation of Sir Walter Scott's generosity of spirit. And she chronicles the lengths amount of research she undertakes to be able to present authentically, through Guido Brunetti and his colleagues, places and characters far from her own experience interviewing a diamond dealer in Venice to open up the world of blood diamonds; meeting, through back channels, a courageous sex worker and women's rights activist to depict accurately the trafficking of women in Italy. Venice is central in her memory, whether recounting the semi-comic irritation of a noisy elderly neighbor or the origins of the city's Carnevale. Her teaching career yields memorable tales helping a young Black boy in a Newark, New Jersey elementary school; instructing young Iranian pilots in English just before the 1979 Iranian Revolution; taking her students at a Swiss private high school to the famous Frank Zappa concert in Montreux interrupted by fire. Throughout, she is as good a storyteller about herself as she is a chronicler of Guido Brunetti's crime adventures. Readers will be as caught up in her world as she is in his.