Pas son meilleur. L'action est fragmenté et pas des plus intéressantes.

An easy and light humored mastery read, great for reading on a road trip or while sitting at the beach. Wasn't particularly deep but the novel was for entertainment. You get drawn into the story and the characters are all interesting and memorable.

An easy and light humored mastery read, great for reading on a road trip or while sitting at the beach. Wasn't particularly deep but the novel was for entertainment. You get drawn into the story and the characters are all interesting and memorable.

This was a real non-event of a book. Inspector Montalbano wakes one morning to find a horse beaten to death on the beach outside his home. He spends three hundred pages occasionally investigating illegal horse racing rings, having clandestine trysts in stables and having his home ransacked by burglars, but mainly eating fish courses and admiring picturesque views.

I was given this for my monthly book group, never having read Andrea Camilleri before, and I can't say I ever will again. As the twelfth in a series, there's a lot of assumed knowledge at play. None of the supporting characters are ever really introduced, and they all act and speak like terrible charicatures. Perhaps it's a translation issue, but the way their Italian dialect is written seems like a horrible parody. Our hero Montalbano doesn't seem like a particularly nice chap - he casually cheats on his girlfriend, then later feels sad about it for all of half a page. The ending is utterly bizarre, and look, I'm sure this makes a lovely television series with some spectacular scenery, but it's written like a very lazy script outline and there's just absolutely no substance to it. The whole thing only took about four hours to read, but I couldn't recommend it.

My least favorite Inspector Montalbano novel, and I've read all of them. I thought the plot was very poor, and the story was full of gratuitous sex and not very interesting interactions between Montalbano and one of Ingrid's friends.

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspector Salvatore Montalbano wakes from strange dreams to find a gruesomely bludgeoned horse carcass in front of his seaside home. When his men came to investigate, the carcass has disappeared, leaving only a trail in the sand. Then his home is ransacked and the inspector is certain that the crimes are linked. As he negotiates both the glittering underworld of horseracing and the Mafia's connection to it, Montalbano is aided by his illiterate housekeeper, Adelina, and a Proustian memory of linguate fritte. Longtime fans and new readers alike will be charmed by Montalbano's blend of unorthodox methods, melancholy self-reflection, and love of good food.

My Review: This is book 12 in the apparently immortal Camilleri's Montalbano series. Unlike many late books in other series, Montalbano is fresh and exciting. The plots are from Camilleri's toolkit, providing no sense of novelty. This is far from being a drawback, since Camilleri has such a full bag. Still and all, some new directions would be welcome.

I'll confess right here and now that horse racing bores me just a tiny bit less than cricket. I can maintain consciousness at a horse race. Cricket not so much. Camilleri's storytelling prowess make up for a lot of uninterest for me. And then we have the scrumdiddilyumptious menus. All fish, all gloriously nummy. Enzo, the new chef in the series after the the elderly man and his sister (I think) whose trattoria was Montalbano's previous altar for worshiping Poseidon's gifts, makes sure this incredibly loyal and very hungry regular customer gets only the freshest, the best, and the most carefully loved delicacies. The Sicilian diet is fish-heavy, as one would expect from an island culture. Spoiled for choice, Montalbano favors a few fishes that the US doesn't venerate (eg, mullet) and which the series has inspired me to search out (eg, mullet).

As always, Montalbano is having troubles with Livia, the most masochistic woman in Italy and the Inspector's ladyfriend for...well, forever it would seem. Nothing ever goes quite right for these starcrossed superannuated Romeo and Juliet. It's one of the charms of the series, at least for a while. Spacing out one's reads of the books prevents burnout on that plotline.

As always, Camilleri provides the reader with a full and satisfying resolution to the story's central puzzle. But this tale earned less than four stars from me because so much of the story felt like a lot of to-ing and fro-ing for too little reward. But even a ~meh~ Camilleri book is better than most other writers at their "peak."

Long live Camilleri! Long live Montalbano!