Treasure Hunt by Andrea Camilleri

Treasure Hunt by Andrea Camilleri

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yet another brilliantly written whodunnit about Chief Inspector Montalbano from Andrea Camilleri. 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, the initial crime is almost inconsequential, but it leads Montalbano to accept the challenge to go on a "treasure hunt".  As always, I find myself sidetracked by Sartarelli's translation magic. One of the clues in the treasure hunt is a simple substitution cipher, and I initially wondered at the ability to translate it wholesale into English, before it occurred to me that he actually just translated the plaintext, and then used the rules deduced by the inspector to recreate the enciphered text, but it doesn't detract from Sartarelli's brilliance.

You get no medals for being able to figure out who's leading Montalbano on this treasure hunt, and the conclusion is fairly predictable, but you'll enjoy yourself almost every step of the way (there is one particularly gruesome murder that I hope you don't enjoy...)

The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri

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!