Fourth in the Salvo Montalbano Italian police procedural series in which Salvo discovers the body of a beautiful young woman in her home when he stops to find out why the home’s owner has not responded to a note he left when one of their police cars collides with her car that was parked outside the home. As usual, the politics of the department and the country take the case over and Salvo must investigate on the sly after being taken off the case by the new commissioner. The gruff and grumpy Montalbano shows his vulnerable side too, briefly. A quick, enjoyable visit to Sicily where the author puts you right in the heart of the place, evoking smells, tastes and views that leave little to the imagination. Good stuff! ( )

I keep recommending Camilleri to other people. They ignore me. Have his non Montalbano books been translated into English?

This is the 36th book I have read this year, and the fourth one in the Inspector Montalbano series.

As with all of the others, I enjoyed it very much, although it does slightly feel like more of the same. The books are pretty formulaic, but that certainly does not detract from the pleasure of reading them. A gap of perhaps a year between each book would probably be beneficial.

In this book, Montalbano investigates the violent murder of a beautiful woman. There appear to be many possible suspects for the murder, and as always, Montalbano manages to upset his superiors, his colleagues and even his girlfriend, the long suffering Livia, during the course of his investigations. Things of course, are not what they initially seem, and it is up to Montalbano to find his way through the web of lies, and get to the truth of the matter. In the meantime, there are problems in his personal life, where events do not unfold as Montalbano and Livia had hoped.

All in all, a really good read. ( )

4th in the Inspector Montalbano series.

Montalbano and Gallo are on their way to a funeral. Thanks to Gallo’s mania for speed, they inadvertently crash into a parked car, causing extensive damage to both cars. Still, the police car can move, and they proceed to the funeral after Montalbano conscientiously leaves a note with his name and phone number under the windshield wiper of the other car. But when they return, there is no sign that the owner has even been near the car.

Suspicious, Montalbano makes a midnight reconnaissance of the house in front of which the car is parked, and finds a beautiful naked woman who has been murdered by suffocation. Naturally, he can not report the crime, since he is in the house illegally, but ever ingenious, he calls on a friend, an old woman with whom he has worked before, to make an anonymous phone call to the police.

The old police commissioner, a friend of Montalbano’s, has retired, and a new one who has absolutely no use for Montalbano (the feeling is mutual) and his idiosyncratic ways, removes him from the case and puts it in the hands of an arrogant publicity seeker—with disastrous results.

To make life even more bizarre, Catarella is selected to attend computer school to the cynical amusement of all hands. Except that strange things happen in that arena as well.

This is pure Montalbano in the hands of that master craftsman, Camilleri, and has all the elements that so delighted in the earlier books: humor, well-drawn characters over the entire spectrum of recurring and non-recurring, it-can-only-happen-in-Sicily ambiance, good plotting, and more food to die for. You can’t lose with this series.

Highly recommended. ( )

In The Snack Thief (Inspector Montalbano Mysteries), Andrea Camilleri threw his protagonist into a mind set and cricumstances that Montalbano would never have voluntarily accepted. But the circumstances of the previous book wreaked havoc with his emotions and his life. In this novel, life more or less gets jerked back into place.

The beauty of this book, as with the entire series is HOW the circumstances jerked it back into place. All is not what it appears, that is the mantra of most mystery novels, none more so than the Inspector Montalbano series. Because Camilleri is juggling many balls at once. he is making social and political comementaries on the state of Italian and Sicilian politics and cultrue, he is talking about food, and the proper appreciation of food. he is also making judgement calls on relationships between people, whether it is between men and women or everyday dealings, he has a lot to say. But this isn't a series about third person reveries on the esoteric subject of human relations, the protagonist is not sitting on some exalted throne, making sniggly and cowardly observations. The protagonist is in the middle of the fight between right and wrong while also living in a world suffused with grey moral tonalities. It is, as I had said before, extremely Italian, where justification is often demanded but the circumstances will always diffuse the response into meanginglessness. ( )