Series fans will especially enjoy learning the origins of Montalbano and company. Though the title story is a bit...
In the long title story that opens this collection, Camilleri shows sardonic Sicilian Inspector Montalbano, years before he became rumpled and stricken by a perpetual midlife crisis, with vigor and swag.
Office gossip tips young Salvo Montalbano that he's about to be promoted. He's unpleasantly surprised to learn that he won't be staying in his beloved Mascalippa but consigned to Vigàta, known for its heavy Mafia population. When his girlfriend, Mery, finds out the news, she hangs up on him. The blunt effrontery of Vigàta's citizens is a challenge, as are the quirks of his new colleagues. Montalbano feels cornered into arresting a young woman who seems dumbstruck with fright but is brandishing a revolver and wants to kill a judge. The girl, Rosanna Monaco, a domestic who's barely an adult, touches Montalbano's heart. He finds trouble at her home, along with a secret lover. Intuition helps him to unravel the crime, whose solution brings him no pleasure. The novel-length story, even longer than some of Montalbano's 19 previous cases (A Beam of Light, 2015, etc.), is supplemented by an additional 20 short stories from various points in Montalbano's career. Notable among these are "Mortally Wounded," about a twisty murder probe, and "The Cat and the Goldfinch," which features some delightfully offbeat character portraits.
Series fans will especially enjoy learning the origins of Montalbano and company. Though the title story is a bit low-stakes, newcomers may be sufficiently intrigued by Camilleri's droll humor and nifty storytelling to check out the rest of the series.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-312162-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Koontz widens his canvas dramatically while dimming the hard brilliance common to his shorter winners:1995’s taut masterpiece, Intensity, and 1998’s moon-drenched midsummer nightmare, Seize the Night. This time the author takes up mind control, wiring his tale into the brainwashing epics The Manchurian Candidate and last spring’s film The Matrix. The laser-beam brightness of his earlier bestsellers fades, however, as he stuffs each scene with draining chitchat and extra plotting that seldom rings with novelty. Martine “Martie” Rhodes, a video-game designer, has developed a rare mental disorder: autophobia, fear of oneself. Meanwhile, her husband Dusty’s young half-brother, Skeet Caulfield, has decided to jump off the roof of a building the two men are repairing—because Skeet has seen the Angel of the next world, who has revealed that things are pretty wonderful there, and he wants to come on over. Martie’s best friend, real-estate agent Susan Jagger, is newly coping with agoraphobia, fear of the outdoors. What’s more, Susan knows she’s being visited and raped at night by her separated husband, Eric, although all her doors and windows are locked. She can’t remember these rapes, but her panties are stained with semen. So when she sets up a camcorder to record her sleeping hours, she gets a huge surprise after viewing the tape. How these mental and physical events have come about—ditto the psychiatric background of the Keanuphobe millionairess who shows up (yes! she fears Keanu Reeves)—has something to do with the ladies’ psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Ahriman, the son of a famous dead movie director whose eyes the doctor keeps in a bottle of formaldehyde and studies, in hopes of siphoning off Dad’s inspiration. Although the whole story could have been told to better effect in 300 pages, Koontz deftly sidesteps clichÇs of expression while nonetheless applying an air pump to the suspense: an MO that keeps his yearly 17-million book sales afloat.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10666-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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