Showing results by author "Andrea Camilleri" in All Categories

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. 

Mimi Augello is visiting his lover when the woman's husband unexpectedly returns to the apartment. Hurriedly, he climbs out the window and into the downstairs apartment, but from one danger to another. In the dark he sees a body lying on the bed. Shortly afterwards another body is found and the victim is Carmelo Catalanotti, a director of bourgeois dramas with a harsh reputation for the acting method he developed for his actors: digging into their complexes to unleash their talent, a traumatic experience for all. 

On what should be a quiet Sunday morning, Inspector Montalbano is called to a murder scene on the Sicilian coast. A man has discovered his father dead in his Vigàtan beach house: his body slumped on the dining room floor, his morning coffee spilt across the table, and a single gunshot wound at the base of his skull.

Vigàta is bustling as the new filming location for a Swedish television series set in 1950. In the production frenzy, the director asks the locals to track down movies and vintage photos to faithfully recreate the air of Vigàta at that time. Meanwhile, Montalbano is grappling with a double mystery, one that emerges from the past and another that leads him into the future.

In Inspector Montalbano’s coastal town of Vigàta, a surge of migrants have been coming in by boat, and all the town’s hands are on deck to help the arrivals. At the heart of the scene are the police - on the lookout for the people smugglers responsible - and long night shifts are rendering Inspector Montalbano and his officers exhausted. Then one night, while Montalbano is enduring yet another gruelling stint at the port, a separate crime is committed - unexplained, unexpected, and unpleasant. Elena, the dressmaker at the town’s famous tailors, has been found dead....

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.

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.

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.

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.

Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories is a brilliant collection of short stories, personally chosen by Andrea Camilleri, following 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 whom she is trying to kill and why.... Other cases include a missing woman who has run away from the love of her life, an old married couple who appear to be rehearsing their suicides and a crime so dark there's only one person the inspector can call for help.

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.

He began swimming in slow, broad strokes. The sea smelled harsh, stinging his nostrils like champagne, and he nearly got drunk on it.... In a fraction of a second, Montalbano realized he'd struck a human foot. Somebody else was floating right beside him, and he hadn't noticed. 'Excuse me,' he said hastily, flipping back onto his belly and looking over at the other. The person beside him didn't answer, because he wasn't doing the dead man's float. He was actually dead.

It's been raining for days in Vigàta, and the persistent downpours have led to violent floods overtaking the Inspector's beloved hometown, sweeping across the land and leaving only a sea of mud behind. It is on one of these endless grey days that a man - a Mr Giuglù Nicotra - is found dead. His body discovered in a large sewage tunnel, half naked and with a bullet in his back.

When a crazed elderly man and his sister begin firing bullets from their balcony down onto the Vigàta street below, Inspector Montalbano finds himself a reluctant television hero. A few days later, when a letter arrives containing a mysterious riddle, the Inspector becomes drawn into a perplexing treasure hunt set by an anonymous challenger. As the hunt intensifies, Montalbano is relieved to be offered the assistance of Arturo Pennisi, a young man eager to witness the detective's investigative skills firsthand.

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….

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.

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....

From the title story, Death at Sea, in which the alleged manslaughter of an engineer upon a fishing trawler leads Inspector Montalbano to uncover an even more sinister crime, Andrea Camilleri takes his listeners through eight cunning cases from the Vigàtan police files. Starting with an arson attack on a hotel that leaves the distraught owner as the chief suspect; to the mysterious case of a woman who goes missing in an underpass with a million lira in her handbag; to a threat on Montalbano’s own life, as an anonymous motorcyclist takes a shot at the detective.

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 sweltering heat.