The Wings of the Sphinx (Inspector Montalbano Mysteries)
by Andrea Camilleri
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Book Summary Information
Author: Andrea CamilleriTranslator: Stephen Sartarelli
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-12-29
ISBN: 0143116606
Number of pages: 231
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of The Wings of the Sphinx (Inspector Montalbano Mysteries)
Book Review: Va bene!
Summary: 4 Stars
Inspector Silvio Montalbano is feeling every one of his fifty-six years. In this eleventh installment in the Inspector Montalbano series, author Andrea Camilleri neither disappoints nor dazzles, instead turning in the journeyman performance expected. If anything, Montalbano, "meteoropathic" (he is profoundly influenced by the weather) inspector in Vigata, a fictional town in Siciliy, goes through his paces: his extravagant lunches at Enzo's, his tortuous conversations with Catarella, the desk sergeant who is the master of the malaprop, his walk to the end of the jetty to contemplate life, his whiskies on his veranda, his perplexing love-life with long time paramour Livia...it's all here. Yet fresh, nuanced.
Montalbano actually flees the scene of the crime that launches this book, the discovery of the body of a young woman, shot in the face and discarded in the city dump, naked. He can no longer deal with death visited upon the young. He is assailed, as are we all, with television's daily diet of death and dismemberment, war and violence visited on young and old. Montalbano still performs his amazing leaps of logic, his finely honed intuition often delivering the necessary bridge needed to solve a crime or determine a motive, yet in this book he leaves much of the work to his more-than-capable assistants, Mimi Augello and Fazio. His investigation wanders through a Catholic charity, private homes, the remains of a burned-out retail business, and prison.
As always, Camilleri creates a sense of place and sets it firmly in time. Through Montalbano he takes his obligatory swipes at Silvio Berlusconi, the web of the powerful who seem to trample through every investigation, and the Sicilian bureaucracy,
While the series isn't great literature, it is a great series. Camilleri keeps his characters fresh, building on them in each subsequent work. You feel what Montalbano feels, the frustration, the powerlessness, the emotions of growing older and wiser but no less effective against the powers that be.
When we visited Italy a couple of years ago I wanted to purchase the first book in the series, The Shape of Water (La forma dell' acqua) in Italian. When I walked into a bookstore in Rome and asked for the title, the clerk beamed and shouted "Mafia! Mafia!" Camilleri's a well-known and respected writer in Italy, with the series turned into a television program.
Summary of The Wings of the Sphinx (Inspector Montalbano Mysteries)
Food, love, and murder-Sicilian style-in the gripping eleventh installment of The New York Times bestselling Montalbano mystery series.Things are not going well for Inspector Salvo Montalbano. His relationship with Livia is once again on the rocks and-acutely aware of his age-he is beginning to grow weary of the endless violence he encounters. Then a young woman is found dead, her face half shot off and only a tattoo of a sphinx moth giving any hint of her identity. The tattoo links her to three similarly marked girls-all victims of the underworld sex trade-who have been rescued from the Mafia night-club circuit by a prominent Catholic charity. The problem is, Montalbano's inquiries elicit an outcry from the Church and the three other girls are all missing.
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