The Dance of the Seagull

January 7, 2013
Camilleri's agreeable 15th Insp. Salvo Montalbano mystery (after 2012's Age of Doubt) finds the Sicilian detective sitting on the deck of his home in Vigàta, watching a seagull performing a strange death dance. The image hovers in his mind during the events that follow, the first of which is the disappearance of his right-hand man, Fazio. This news is delivered by one of his men at the police station, the devoted Catarella, who speaks in a slang that, however appropriate to his character, sounds in translation like that of a cheesy B-movie Mafia character. Nevertheless, the wonderfully rendered camaraderie between Catarella and Montalbano is one of the book's highlights. In addition to searching for the missing Fazio, Montalbano tries to identify a body found in a deserted well. Both investigations are pieces of a larger, satisfying mystery in which Montalbano investigates, among other things, the docks and late-night deliveries from fishing trawlers.

January 15, 2013
The disappearance of Inspector Silvio Montalbano's sidekick hits the whole squad room hard. Insomnia increasingly plagues the Sicilian detective as he slides into his late 50s. So he's even crankier than usual when he picks up his ladylove Livia at the Palermo airport early in the morning for a brief getaway. Livia has never seen some of the more picaresque parts of the island, and Montalbano, as always, needs a break. But a brief stop at the office throws all his plans into disarray when he learns that his faithful second-in-command, Fazio, has gone missing. The vacation is off, and Montalbano begins to retrace Fazio's recent movements, aided (or hindered) by Mimi, his high-maintenance third-in-command, who's made even less attentive by an ongoing quarrel with his wife, Beba. An additional annoyance comes from the presence of a film crew making a TV series based loosely on Montalbano's cases (The Age of Doubt, 2012, etc.). At length, Fazio is found in a hospital, severely banged up and with little memory of the events that landed him there. Investigation reveals that Fazio, who'd been working near the docks on a drug smuggling case, walked into an ambush. The loopy path to a solution, inspired by recent headlines, leads through a potential scandal involving a government official, a secret locale in a remote village and bickering pedicurists. Montalbano's 15th case features more hilarious bark and some satisfying bite.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2013

In his 15th outing (after The Age of Doubt), Inspector Montalbano is distracted by a bird's odd behavior and discovers that his colleague Fazio has gone missing. [See Prepub Alert, 8/20/12.]

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2013
There's not quite as much careening chaos in Salvo Montalbano's latest adventure as there was in The Age of Doubt (2012), but that's not to say matters move logically from crime to investigation to solution. Not hardly. That's not how the impetuous Sicilian police inspector operates, and frankly, we wouldn't want it any other way. The charm of a Montalbano mystery derives in large part from the way the inspector's helter-skelter approach to investigation mirrors the inherent messiness of life. Rather than standing on shore and observing the swirling riptides of human behavior, Montalbano dives right into the murky waters and lets himself be thrown about in the current until the passing flotsam and jetsam form a pattern. So it goes here, in a typically convoluted case that begins with a seagull's dance of death and moves quickly to the disappearance of Montalbano's friend and colleague, Fazio, and zooms from there to a smuggling scheme, a honey trap, and a particularly ugly murder. By the time Montalbano climbs out of the muck this time, he's a bit more battered than usual, but that's nothing a very large bowl of caponata won't fix.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)