Andrea Camilleri

This novel begins in the Pasture, an area outside the Sicilian city of Vigatà. The Pasture is overseen by a powerful local gangster named Gegè Gullatto, who runs several thriving “business operations” there including drugs and prostitution. Early one morning, two men assigned to cleaning duty in the Pasture discover a dead man in an abandoned car, a man who’d obviously had a sexual encounter just before his death. The dead man turns out to be Silvio Luparello, also known as “the engineer.” Luparello was a successful businessman who had managed to stay in the background as one of his political party’s “power brokers” for quite a long time. But when the opportunity presented itself Luperallo emerged as the party leader. The discovery of his body in very compromising circumstances will get a lot of media attention and cause a great deal of unpleasantness for Luparello’s family and for the party. So Inspector Salvo Montalbano is asked to keep the investigation as quiet and brief as possible. He’s strongly encouraged in fact to “rubber stamp” the explanation that Luparello died of a heart attack and cover up the news of the notorious area where the body was found.

Montalbano begins to suspect that this wasn’t just a case of a heart attack at a very inopportune time though, and he gets grudging permission to take just a little more time and investigate just a little more thoroughly. What he finds as he gets started is that several people might have wanted Luparello to die.

Fans of this series who never got a chance to read this first novel will be glad to find out how it all began, so to speak, and how many of the characters are introduced. Be warned though; Sergeant Agatino Catarella, whom fans know as the well-meaning and eager but incompetent station sergeant, doesn’t make an appearance here. He doesn’t debut until The Terra Cotta Dog. Many of the characters aren’t as well-developed as they become later in the series, so regular readers may be disappointed in the apparent lack of depth of a few of them. But it is a good place to begin this series if you haven’t tried it before.

And then there’s the character of Salvo Montalbano himself. Philosophical and cynical, he is also dogged enough and hopeful enough to keep plugging away at this murder mystery despite the fact that he knows it won’t make corruption go away. Montalbano is all too well aware of how much crime, graft, and so on take place in Sicily and he’s pretty sure that just his efforts aren’t going to change that. But he is just as determined not to, if you will, give into it. He is a lover of fine food, so no novel featuring him would be complete without at least some mention of the delicious cuisine of the area. There’s also a solid sense of humour that runs through this novel. A word here is in order too about Stephen Sartarelli’s excellent translation. The humour comes through very effectively and so do other nuances that wouldn’t be possible without a top-notch translation.

A distinctively Sicilian murder mystery, The Shape of Water introduces an equally Sicilian detective and his team in the context of an interesting puzzle with a dash of humour. Oh, and there’s the food…

Review by Margot Kinberg, Confessions of a Mystery Novelist