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| Hardback Picador (2007) |
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The Scent of the Night
Montalbano learned how hard it was to put on a wetsuit while in a dinghy speeding over a sea that wasn’t exactly calm. Mimi, at the helm, looked tense and worried. ‘Getting seasick?’ the inspector asked him at one point. ‘No. Just sick of myself.’ ‘Why?, ‘Because every now and then I realize what a stupid shit I am to go along with some of your brilliant ideas.’As an angry octogenarian holds a terrified and lovelorn secretary at gunpoint, Inspector Montalbano is reluctantly drawn into the case. The secretary’s boss, a financial adviser, has vanished along with several billion lire entrusted to him by the good citizens of Vigata. Also missing is the adviser’s young colleague, whose uncle just happens to be building a house on the site of Inspector Montalbano’s very favourite olive tree ...
| First British Edition Picador (2006) |
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Excursion to Tindari
Maybe a phrase, a line, a hint somewhere would reveal a reason, any reason, for the elderly couple’s disappearance. They’d saved everything ... there was even a copy of the ‘certificate of living existence,’ that nadir of bureaucratic imbecility ... What was the ‘protocol,’ to use a word dear to government offices? Did one simply write on a sheet of paper something like: ‘l, the undersigned, Salvo Montalbano, hereby declare myself to be in existence,’ sign it, and turn it in to the appointed clerk?A young Don Juan is found murdered in front of his apartment building early one morning, and an elderly couple is reported missing after an excursion to the ancient site of Tindari - two seemingly unrelated cases for Inspector Montalbano to solve amid the daily complications of life at Vigata police headquarters. But when Montalbano discovers that the couple and the murdered young man lived in the same building, his investigation stumbles onto Sicily’s brutal `New Mafia’, which leads him down a path more evil and more far-reaching than any he has been down before.
| First British Edition Picador (2004) |
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The Snack Thief
`Montalbano took a good half hour to eat his mullets, either because be wanted to savour them as they deserved, or to give the colonel the impression that he didn’t give a flying fuck about what the man might have to say to him. He didn’t even offer him a glass of wine. He acted as if he were alone, to the point where he even once burped out loud. For his part, Lohengrin Pera, once he’d sat down, had stopped moving, limiting himself to staring at the inspector with beady, viperlike eyes. Only when Montalbano had downed a demi-tasse of espresso did the colonel begin to speak…’When an elderly man is stabbed to death in an elevator and a crewman on an Italian fishing trawler is machine-gunned by a Tunisian patrol boat off Sicily’s coast, only Inspector Montalbano suspects the link between the two incidents. His investigation leads to the beautiful Karima, an impoverished house cleaner and sometime prostitute, whose young son steals other schoolchildren’s mid-morning snacks. But Karima disappears, and the young snack thief’s life - as well as Montalbano’s - is endangered when the inspector exposes a viper’s nest of government corruption and international intrigue.
| First British Edition Picador (2004) |
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| Paperback - Picador (2004) |
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The Terracotta Dog
’In the alternately desperate, stammering, hesitant, bewildered, flabbergasted, lost but always wild-eyed man framed pitilessly in the foreground by the Free Channel’s videocamera, Montalbano scarcely recognized himself under the storm of questions form vile snake-in-the-grass journalists. And the part where he’d explained how tabisca was made – the part in which he came off best – had been cut out. Maybe it wasn’t strictly in keeping with the principle subject, the capture of Tano the Greek’The Terracotta Dog opens with a mysterious tęte-ŕ-tęte with a Mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, and some dying words that lead Inspector Montalbano to a secret grotto in a mountain cave where two young lovers, dead fifty years and still embracing, are watched over by a life-size terracotta dog. Montalbano’s passion to solve this old crime takes him, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island’s past and into a family’s dark heart amid the horrors of World War II.
| Paperback - Pan (2004) |
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| First British Edition Picador (2003) |
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The Shape of Water
Montalbano made himself a dish of spaghetti with a sauce of seaurchin pulp and turned on the television. Naturally, all the local news programmes were talking about Luparello’s death . . . But not a single one of them dared to mention where and in what circumstances the late lamented Luparello had met his end . . .The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner’s verdict is death from natural causes -refreshingly unusual for Sicily.
Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.
The Scent of the Night
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