The latest mystery in Andrea Camilleri's internationally bestselling Inspector Montalbano series
With their dark sophistication and dry humor, Andrea Camilleri's classic crime novels continue to win more and more fans in America. The latest installment of the popular mystery series finds the moody Inspector Montalbano further beset by the existential questions that have been plaguing him of late. But he doesn't have much time to wax philosophical before the gruesome murder of a man-shot at point-blank range in the face with his pants down-commands his attention. Add two evasive, beautiful women as prime suspects, some dirty cocaine, mysterious computer codes, and a series of threatening letters, and things soon get very complicated at the police headquarters in VigΓ ta.
Read translator Stephen Sartarelli's post on the Penguin Blog.
From Publishers Weekly
At the start of Camilleri's wry ninth Insp. Salvo Montalbano procedural (after 2007's The Patience of the Spider), the irascible detective is hoping for a quiet day at his VigΓ ta office when a visitor, the beguiling Michela Pardo, implores him to help her track down her missing brother, Angelo. Montalbano accompanies Michela to Angelo's apartment, where they find her brother's gunshot-blasted corpse in a compromising position. Montalbano later discovers a possible link between the murder and a series of drug overdoses whose victims include a popular senator. Angelo's affair with a professor's attractive wife offers another avenue of inquiry, but one that gets complicated when the inspector begins to fall in love with the suspect. Humor, much of it provided by Montalbano's eccentric colleagues, leavens the noirish story line, and the solution to the central puzzle is both psychologically plausible and intellectually satisfying. The crisp prose is a pleasure to read, and a last-minute twist a testament to the author's artistry. (Mar.)
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From Booklist
Salvo Montalbano, the beleaguered police inspector in the Sicilian community of Vigata, suffers from a kind of laid-back bipolarism, alternating between a gourmandβs love of sensual pleasures and a melancholicβs inability to make sense of lifeβs tragedies, large and small. He teeters on the emotional seesaw of those extremes in his latest adventure, which concerns the murder of a pharmaceutical salesman, who is found with his zipper open but with no evidence of recent sexual activity. Montalbano is an intuitive sleuth, but, like Inspector Adamsberg in Fred Vargasβ series set in France, his instincts often lead him astray. So it goes here, as Montalbano vacillates between suspecting a crime of passion involving either the victimβs sister or his former lover (to whom Salvo is disconcertingly attracted) or opting for the more traditional explanation of a Mafia hit (in which the unzipped body was merely a ruse). Solutions are found, of course, but resolution proves elusive as Montalbano muses on our myriad human frailties and how they so often lead to calamity. A must for fans of Donna Leonβs similarly meditative Guido Brunetti. --Bill Ott
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