Starred review from August 5, 2013
Early in Camilleri’s superlative 16th mystery featuring Insp. Salvo Montalbano (after The Dance of the Seagull), two reclusive religious fanatics—brother and sister Gregorio and Caterina Palmisano—start firing guns at the “sinners” in the street below their apartment building in Vigàta, Sicily. Montalbano and his team lay siege to the Palmisanos’ house and eventually disarm the elderly couple without bloodshed. Soon afterward, Montalbano finds an envelope addressed to him marked “treasure hunt.” Inside is a short poem that appears to be a riddle, the first of several such messages. While he’s inclined to dismiss them as the work of a crank, a niggling sense of discomfort remains. Meanwhile, a number of bizarre incidents puzzle Montalbano, including the discovery in a dumpster of what at first is mistaken for a woman’s corpse but is in fact a decrepit inflatable sex doll. Furthermore, it’s an exact duplicate of the one Montalbano and crew noticed in Gregorio’s bed the night of the siege. Once again, Camilleri’s sardonic sense of humor distinguishes this Mediterranean crime novel from the pack. Agent: Donatella Barbieri, Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale (Italy).
Starred review from October 15, 2013
Inflatable sex dolls, the delivery of a sheep's head, Harry Potter run amok: What madness has Inspector Montalbano gotten himself into now? Devout brother and sister Gregorio and Caterina Palmisano trigger a panic in the Sicilian town of Vigata when they hang banners from the balcony of their apartment warning local sinners to REPENT! Each week, a new banner appears, more fervent than the last. When police visit the lodging, the duo turn snipers, shooting at the would-be intruders. Upon searching their apartment after they are taken into custody, Montalbano finds a creepy excess of crucifixes and a blow-up sex doll with distinct markings on Gregorio's bed. He takes it home for safekeeping and adds an unlikely twin, discovered in a Dumpster. Not long after, Montalbano begins receiving cryptic verses challenging him to a "treasure hunt." He takes this invitation lightly, a bit of escapism, until a package containing a sheep's head gives him pause. When his lovely and flirtatious old flame Ingrid asks him to mentor a young friend who's passionate about law enforcement, Montalbano, seeing an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, sets the young Arturo, a dead ringer for Harry Potter, onto the hunt. The young man responds like a conquistador. The mood is abruptly darkened by the disappearance of a local teenage girl, which Camilleri expertly ties to all that has happened heretofore. Montalbano's 16th case (The Dance of the Seagull, 2013, etc.) is his most entertaining in years, veering from slapstick humor to Grand Guignol with aplomb.
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Starred review from October 15, 2013
Insp. Salvo Montalbano, who lives and works in Vigata, Sicily, becomes an instant celebrity when he scales a wall, gun in hand, to capture two elderly siblings, crazed by religion, who are shooting at the people in the piazza below them as punishment for their sins. Then someone, nobody knows who, sends Montalbano a series of cryptic messages in bad verse. Farce--a pair of matching inflatable sex dolls feature in the story--turns into tragedy as the narrative progresses. A mishmash of police procedural, gothic horror story, and Keystone Kops comedy, this book has something in common with William Marshall's little-known "Yellowthread Street" series (1975-98). VERDICT This is the 16th entry (after The Dance of the Seagull) in Camilleri's series featuring Montalbano. It's one of the best.
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 15, 2013
Sicilian police inspector Salvo Montalbano has a way of finding himself in some truly oddball situations, but this time he outdoes himself, with the oddball gauge securely in the red zone from the get-go. It starts with a comical action scene: a crazed brother and sister open fire from their apartment window on the plaza below, prompting Montalbano to turn Spider-Man and scale the building, collaring the seventysomething snipers. The inspector's unlikely heroics are heralded in the press, prompting a curious response: someone begins sending Salvo peculiar notes, in rhyme, demanding that he take part in a treasure hunt. The clues seem only eccentric in the beginning, but as Montalbano follows the paths they chart, he begins to sense a sinister undertone. Could the hunt possibly tie in to the disappearance of a local girl? As always, Camilleri expertly mixes comedy with serious crime, but this time the evil foreshadowings dominate the tone (harking back to the earlier volumes in the series). Salvo wears his melancholy wellmusings on aging accentuate the dark direction of the plotand the bittersweet ending hits just the right end note.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)