The Shape of Water (Inspector Montalbano, #1)
Andrea Camilleri
The Shape of Water is the first in Andrea Camilleri's wry, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series, featuring Inspector Montalbano.The goats of Vigàta 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. But Inspector Salvo Montalbano, as honest as he is streetwise and as scathing to fools and villains as he is compassionate to their victims, is not ready to close the case - even though he's being pressured by Vigàta's police chief, judge, and bishop. Picking his way through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta firepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.The Shape of Water is followed by the second in this phenomenal series, The Terracotta Dog.
Publication Year: 2005
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0 0I devoured this book.
This is a mystery novel with an appropriately complex plot, but that isn’t the hook. The hook is author Andrea Camilleri’s, and translator Stephen Sartarelli’s, combined authorial voice. This plus the Sicilian setting, make ‘The Shape of Water’ irresistible.
Camilleri’s characters come across like real, living people. Some of them you love, some of them you hate, but none of them lead you to roll your eyes and think, “Oh, no. Not another stock hero/villain/femme fatale.” His scene-settings and background characters evoke the quasi-lawless Sicily of the mid-‘90s and populate it with interesting people, many of whom are enmeshed in stories at least as interesting as the one our protagonist is living. This creates of a rich, full, lived-in world in which the novel’s events could actually occur.
The reader should note that I come to this volume with some bias. I’ve spent many months in Sicily with the Navy, and those months number among my fondest memories of military service. In fact, I love the island so much that I brought my family there on vacation. Whenever Camilleri describes a city, or a village, or a dinner in his novel, it makes me happy. More than once while reading this book, I closed it and told my wife, “We have to go back to Sicily as soon as this pandemic is over.” She wholeheartedly agreed.
So if you like detective novels; if you like good writing; and particularly if you love Sicily, ‘The Shape of Water’ is the book for you. A little research shows that there are 27 novels (and an Italian TV show!) in this series. I look forward to devouring them all.
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