Wednesday, August 13, 2014

The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri

The Dance of the Seagull (Inspector Montalbano, #15)The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There's not much to be said about Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano mysteries that I haven't said before. They're mostly tightly written whodunnit's. You get all the clues and any careful reader should be able to figure out the culprit before it's over. But Camilleri never springs any surprises and there's never an annoying Deus Ex Machina to solve the puzzle. On top of Camilleri's excellent mystery writing, we have his descriptions of the food and geography of Sicily that read like a travelogue. And finally Stephen Sartarelli's amazing translations!

In this entry, it's not so much a whodunnit, as a what-was-it-that-was-dun. Montalbano's senior investigator, Fazio, disappears, apparently while involved in an investigation, and when found he's suffering from temporary amnesia from a couple of blows to the head. Montalbano has to figure out both who tried to kill Fazio, and why.  Following the trail leads to a one-time ballet dancer who may have tried to blackmail someone. The only really sour note in the story comes when Montalbano finds a letter to the dancer, and completely misinterprets it. I'd venture to say that any Canadian reader, and most American or British readers, would have the identical reaction that I did, that Montalbano was extremely obtuse to not understand who the author was. But I don't think any amount of superlative editing could change the fact that this is probably a cultural difference between Sicily and practically anywhere else in the Western world.

Anyway, Camilleri is brilliant!

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