There’s a curious feature of the Inspector Montalbano stories that I should talk about. Other detective series rarely follow a chronology, if there’s even one to be followed. That’s how things started out with the Sherlock Holmes stories, which were all drawn from Dr. Watson’s case files in whatever order he chose. There are a few instances in the canon where reference is made to earlier cases that can be identified, but dating the individual stories is itself a parlour game for Holmesians. Similarly, it’s hard to come up with a strict chronology of the cases solved by Hercule Poirot or Ms. Marple or Lew Archer or Nero Wolfe. Which is another way of saying that they are all standalone stories you can read in whatever order you want.
That’s not how the Montalbano canon works. Each novel has two stories. There’s the individual case Montalbano is trying to solve and then there’s the larger story of everything else that’s going on in his life, with events very much following in order from the previous book. So, for example, at the end of The Snack Thief it looked like Montalbano and his mistress (for lack of a better word) Livia were going to adopt François and maybe start a family. In this book, however, that plan is going sideways as François doesn’t want to leave his foster home. Complicating matters is that the woman who is fostering François is Augello’s sister, with Augello being one of Montalbano’s lieutenants and not the one he gets along with the best. There’s some rivalry going on there, and my ears pricked up a bit when Livia says Augello treats her “like a brother” and “more than a brother.” What does that mean? Anyway, when Livia finds out where things stand there are some fireworks. And waterworks. Which made me wonder a bit about this business of having a mistress. I thought the whole point of a mistress is that they bring peace and comfort and understanding into your life. Livia is a pure chaos agent and seems to make Montalbano miserable. And he isn’t even a married man! This shouldn’t be so complicated. But maybe that’s the problem. She should be his girl on the side and instead she’s his only outlet.
Anyway, that’s all part of the big story that’s going on in the background. The specific mystery being investigated has to do with a beautiful woman whose naked body is found, by accident, in an unoccupied house. Montalbano has a way of just having cases like this just drop into his lap. Luckily, the solutions come about almost as conveniently. There’s a clue that’s teased in the early going that you have to be pretty slow not to pick up on because it’s flagged in the title. Things are made more difficult though because of the endless infighting that apparently always goes on within and between different police departments and different levels of the justice system in Sicily.
I thought the mystery part of the story was interesting, with some eccentric characters and a quick pace. Along the way I also learned for the first time about a car named a Twingo (made by Renault, I don’t know if we ever had them here) and a Guarneri violin (very rare and expensive, a rival to the Stradivarius). To be honest, this was probably my favourite book in the series so far, the one I enjoyed the most, so at least things are heading in the right direction.
