Showing results by author "Andrea Camilleri" in All Categories

Two deaths - the suicide of a recently fired worker and the murder of an unscrupulous businessman - lead Inspector Montalbano to the Halcyon, a mysterious ship that visits Vigàta's port each day. With very few crewmen, no passengers and a stern large enough to land a helicopter, it piques the Inspector's interest straight away. And whilst all this is going on, a rare trip to Genoa to visit Livia ends with the Vigàta police department in disarray, and Inspector Montalbano's position as the head of the commissariat in jeopardy. It will be up to Montalbano to fix the damage done.

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 a link between the two incidents. His investigation leads to the beautiful Karima, an impoverished housecleaner and sometime prostitute, whose young son steals other school children's midmorning snacks. But Karima disappears, and the young snack thief's life - as well as Montalbano's - is endangered.

The lazy, slow month of August at the height of the Sicilian summer is, Inspector Montalbano assures his girlfriend, Livia, as they prepare for a relaxing holiday in a villa he has found for them, far too hot for any murders to be committed. But when Livia's friends' young son goes missing, a chain of events is sparked which will certainly ruin the Chief Inspector's pleasant interlude. A secret apartment and a grisly find in an old trunk are just the beginning as Montalbano navigates his way though the case and copes with the heat.

The Terracotta Dog, the second audiobook in Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series, opens with a mysterious tête-à-tête 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 50 years and still embracing, are watched over by a life-size terracotta dog.

It follows Inspector Montalbano from his very first case in Vigàta, in which he stumbles upon a young girl lurking outside a courthouse with a pistol in her handbag. When she is taken in for questioning and won't utter a single word, Montalbano must find another way to learn who she is trying to kill, and why . . .

In una zona malfamata di Montelusa, la mànnara, due munnizzari trovano in un'auto il cadavere di un uomo con gli abiti discinti. E non è un uomo qualunque, ma un prominente uomo politico locale: l'ingegner Lupariello. Camilleri mette in campo per la prima volta il commissario Salvo Montalbano, poliziotto dalle straordinarie doti umane e investigative, che faranno del suo personaggio il più grande successo letterario italiano degli ultimi vent'anni.

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.

Things are not going well for Inspector Montalbano. His long-distance relationship with Livia is on the rocks, he feels himself getting even older and he's growing tired of the violence in his job. Then the dead body of a young woman is found in an illegal dump, with half her face missing. Her identity at first is unknown; a tattoo of a sphinx moth on her left shoulder links her with three other girls bearing the same mark, all recent Russian immigrants to Italy.

Montalbano's gruesome discovery of a naked young woman suffocated in her bed immediately sets him on a search for her killer. Among the suspects are her aging husband, a famous doctor; a shy admirer, now disappeared; an antiques-dealing lover from Bologna; and the victim's friend Anna, whose charms Montalbano cannot help but appreciate. But it is a mysterious, reclusive violinist who holds the key to this murder....

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 'I, the undersigned, Salvo Montalbano, hereby declare myself to be in existence', sign it, and turn it in to the appointed clerk?

Motionless, Montalbano waited for the surf to enter his brain and wash it clean with each breaker. At last the first light wave came like a caress, swiiissshhh, and carried away, glugluglug, Elena Sclafani and her beauty while Michela Pardo's tits, belly, arched body and eyes likewise disappeared. Once Montalbano the man was erased, all that should remain was Inspector Montalbano - a kind of abstract function of the person who was supposed to solve the case and nothing more, with no personal feelings involved.

Inspector Montalbano is awake at dawn, sitting on his porch, when his attention is caught by a seagull that falls from the sky, performing a strange dance, before lying down to die. Montalbano is perplexed by what he has witnessed and the scene hangs over him like an omen. About to depart for a holiday with his girlfriend Livia, Montalbano makes a quick trip to the police station to tie up loose ends. But when his dear colleague Fazio is discovered missing, Montalbano instead launches a desperate search for his lost friend....

Kovalyov wakes one morning to discover that his nose has disappeared! It has mysteriously found its way into a loaf of bread on the barber Yokovlevich's breakfast table. The barber tries to get rid of it, but when Kovalyov steps out onto the St Petersburg streets, he finds his nose, now the size of a human, wearing a gold-embroidered uniform and travelling around in a carriage....

When 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 advisor, has vanished along with several billion lire entrusted to him by the good citizens of Vigàta. Also missing is the advisor's young colleague, whose uncle just happens to be building a house on the site of Inspector Montalbano's very favourite olive tree....

A Vigàta è tornato l'inverno. E il commissario Montalbano non è più un ragazzino. Lo si avverte perché i segni lasciati da tutte le inchieste passate riaffiorano qua e là, con i colori della nostalgia, a ogni passo di quest'ultimo caso. Un caso anomalo in cui il cadavere non spunta all'inizio, e Montalbano non ne è proprio il titolare, ma vi si intrufola. Troppe coincidenze lo spingono. Scava nella scomparsa di un finanziere truffatore, che si è portato via i soldi di mezzo paese e dintorni, e poi del suo aiutante.

La calda e fascinosa voce di uno dei migliori attori italiani, Luigi Lo Cascio, racconta una torbida inchiesta del celebre commissario, un delitto spietato in una casa di periferia di Vigata e tutto sembra condurre alla pista passionale. Il commissario, tuttavia, non si lascia ingannare dalle apparenze. Più pensieroso e malinconico del solito, Montalbano è stretto in mezzo a due donne forti e insidiose. Bellissime ed entrambe possibili assassine.

When Inspector Montalbano receives an early-morning phone call it proves to be the start of a very trying day. For the caller expects Montalbano to arrive imminently at a rendezvous with some friends. But before he can reply, the caller announces himself as someone called Riccardino and hangs up. Later that day, news comes in of a brutal slaying in broad daylight by an unknown assassin who makes his getaway on a motorbike. And when the Inspector learns of the victim’s identity - a man called Riccardino - his troubles are only just beginning.

En una cálida noche siciliana, tras nadar un buen rato en las tranquilas aguas que se remansan a escasos metros de su casa a orillas del mar, Salvo Montalbano emerge de la oscuridad con las ideas más claras: la solución del caso le ronda las narices, así que sólo es cuestión de paciencia y método, para lo cual nada mejor que relajarse antes con algún manjar preparado por Adelina, su fiel asistenta.

Inspector Montalbano rises one morning to find the carcass of a horse on the beach in front of his seaside home. But no sooner do his men arrive than the body has mysteriously vanished, leaving only a track in the sand. Before long Rachele, a beguiling equestrian champion, turns up at police headquarters to report her horse missing. The horse had been stabled at the grounds of a certain Saverio Lo Duca, one of the richest men in Sicily. Lo Duca has lost one of his own horses, too. Montalbano, his curiosity piqued, investigates....

After a hectic morning involving two rather irritating cases of mistaken identity, Inspector Montalbano finally arrives in his office ready find out what's troubling Vigàta this week. What he discovers is unnerving. A woman on her way home from work has been held up at gunpoint, chloroformed and kidnapped, but then released just hours later - unharmed and with all her possessions - into the open countryside. Later that day, Montalbano hears from Enzo, the owner of his favourite restaurant, that his niece has recently been the victim of the exact same crime.