The Paper Moon

January 21, 2008
At the start of Camilleri’s wry ninth Insp. Salvo Montalbano procedural (after 2007’s The Patience of the Spider
), the irascible detective is hoping for a quiet day at his Vigàta office when a visitor, the beguiling Michela Pardo, implores him to help her track down her missing brother, Angelo. Montalbano accompanies Michela to Angelo’s apartment, where they find her brother’s gunshot-blasted corpse in a compromising position. Montalbano later discovers a possible link between the murder and a series of drug overdoses whose victims include a popular senator. Angelo’s affair with a professor’s attractive wife offers another avenue of inquiry, but one that gets complicated when the inspector begins to fall in love with the suspect. Humor, much of it provided by Montalbano’s eccentric colleagues, leavens the noirish story line, and the solution to the central puzzle is both psychologically plausible and intellectually satisfying. The crisp prose is a pleasure to read, and a last-minute twist a testament to the author’s artistry.

April 1, 2008
For Sicilian inspector Salvo Montalbano, the murder of Angelo Pardoshot in the face with his zipper downsuggests various areas of inquiry. Pardo was a pharmaceutical representative with a revoked medical license, connections in high places, an overly devoted sister, and expensive habits who left mysteriously coded computer files. Meanwhile, drug deaths increase alarmingly in the province, with some prominent citizens as victims. In this ninth entry in Camilleri's series, Montalbano is less melancholy than in his previous outing ("The Patience of the Spider"): things are running smoothly with his absent lover, Livia, despite his attraction to the dead man's mistress; he's eating well at Enzo's trattoria, and with treats from his Swedish friend Ingrid, he's even less abrasive with his underlings. But why does the commissioner want to see him, and what do Montalbano's thoughts about dying mean? While the murder is solved after some deft twists, the inspector himself calls for further attention, and fans will welcome Camilleri's tenth. [Camilleri is also featured in "Crimini: The Bitter Lemon Book of Italian Crime Fiction", out this month from Bitter Lemon Press.Ed.]

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2008
Salvo Montalbano, the beleaguered police inspector in the Sicilian community of Vigata, suffers from a kind of laid-back bipolarism, alternating between a gourmands love of sensual pleasures and a melancholics inability to make sense of lifes tragedies, large and small. He teeters on the emotional seesaw of those extremes in his latest adventure, which concerns the murder of a pharmaceutical salesman, who is found with his zipper open but with no evidence of recent sexual activity. Montalbano is an intuitive sleuth, but, like Inspector Adamsberg in Fred Vargas series set in France, his instincts often lead him astray. So it goes here, as Montalbano vacillates between suspecting a crime of passion involving either the victims sister orhis former lover (to whom Salvo is disconcertingly attracted) or opting for the more traditional explanation of a Mafia hit (in which the unzipped body was merely a ruse). Solutions are found, of course, but resolution proves elusive as Montalbano muses on our myriad human frailties and how theyso often lead to calamity. A must for fans of Donna Leons similarly meditative Guido Brunetti.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)