Paper Moon
Inspector Montalbano [9]
Andrea Camilleri
Viking Press (2004)
Rating:
***
Tags:
Mystery, Police Procedural, Mystery & Detective, Andrea Camilleri, General, Fiction, Thriller
### From Publishers Weekly
At the start of Camilleri's wry ninth Insp. Salvo Montalbano procedural (after 2007's *The Patience of the Spider*), the irascible detective is hoping for a quiet day at his Vigàta office when a visitor, the beguiling Michela Pardo, implores him to help her track down her missing brother, Angelo. Montalbano accompanies Michela to Angelo's apartment, where they find her brother's gunshot-blasted corpse in a compromising position. Montalbano later discovers a possible link between the murder and a series of drug overdoses whose victims include a popular senator. Angelo's affair with a professor's attractive wife offers another avenue of inquiry, but one that gets complicated when the inspector begins to fall in love with the suspect. Humor, much of it provided by Montalbano's eccentric colleagues, leavens the noirish story line, and the solution to the central puzzle is both psychologically plausible and intellectually satisfying. The crisp prose is a pleasure to read, and a last-minute twist a testament to the author's artistry. *(Mar.)*
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### From Booklist
Salvo Montalbano, the beleaguered police inspector in the Sicilian community of Vigata, suffers from a kind of laid-back bipolarism, alternating between a gourmand’s love of sensual pleasures and a melancholic’s inability to make sense of life’s tragedies, large and small. He teeters on the emotional seesaw of those extremes in his latest adventure, which concerns the murder of a pharmaceutical salesman, who is found with his zipper open but with no evidence of recent sexual activity. Montalbano is an intuitive sleuth, but, like Inspector Adamsberg in Fred Vargas’ series set in France, his instincts often lead him astray. So it goes here, as Montalbano vacillates between suspecting a crime of passion involving either the victim’s sister or his former lover (to whom Salvo is disconcertingly attracted) or opting for the more traditional explanation of a Mafia hit (in which the unzipped body was merely a ruse). Solutions are found, of course, but resolution proves elusive as Montalbano muses on our myriad human frailties and how they so often lead to calamity. A must for fans of Donna Leon’s similarly meditative Guido Brunetti. --Bill Ott
THE PAPER MOON
ANDREA CAMILLERI
Translated by Stephen Sartarelli
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell. Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in Penguin Books 2008
Translation copyright (c) Stephen Sartarelli, 2008 All rights reserved Originally published in Italian as La luna di carta by Sellerio Editore, Palermo. Copyright (c) 2005 Sellerio Editore.
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 1-4362-0783-5
CIP data available
Set in Bembo Designed by Jaye Zimet
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1
The alarm rang, as it had done every morning for the past year, at seven-thirty. But he had woken up a fraction of a second before the bell; the release of the spring that set off the ringing had sufficed. He therefore had time, before jumping out of bed, to look over at the window and realize, from the light, that the day promised to be a fine one, without clouds. Afterwards he just barely had time to make coffee, drink a cup, do what he needed to do, shave and shower, drink another cup, fire up a cigarette, get dressed, go outside, get in his car, and pull up at the station at nine—all at the slapstick speed of Larry Semon or Charlie Chaplin.
Up until one year earlier, his morning wake-up routine had followed different rules, and, most of all, there was no rush, no hundred-meter dashes.
First, no alarm clock.
Montalbano was in the habit of opening his eyes naturally after a night’s sleep, with no need of external stimuli. He did have an alarm clock of sorts, but it was inside him, buried somewhere in his brain. He merely had to set it be-fore falling asleep, telling himself,Don’t forget you have to get up tomorrow at six,and the next morning his eyes would pop open at six o’clock sharp. He’d always considered the alarm clock, the metal kind, an instrument of torture. The three or four times he’d had to use that drill-like noise to wake up— because Livia, who had to leave the next morning, didn’t trust his inner alarm—he’d spent the rest of the day with a headache. Then Livia, after a squabble, bought a plastic alarm clock that instead of ringing made an electronic sound, a kind of unendingbeeeeeep,rather like a little fly that had found its way into your ear and got stuck inside. Enough to drive you crazy. He’d ended up throwing it out the window, which triggered another memorable spat.
Second, he would wake himself up, intentionally, a bit earlier than necessary, some ten minutes earlier at the very least.
These were the best ten minutes of the day ahead. Ah, how wonderful it was to lie there in bed, under the covers, thinking of idiocies!Should I buy that book everybody’s calling a masterpiece, or not? Should I eat out today, or come home and scarf down what Adelina’s prepared for me? Should I or shouldn’t I tell Livia that I can’t wear the shoes she bought me because they’re too tight?That sort of thing. Poking about with the mind. While carefully avoiding, however, any thought of sex or women. That could be dangerous terrain at that hour, unless Livia were there sleeping beside him, ready and happy to face the consequences.
One morning a year earlier, however, things had suddenly changed. He had barely opened his eyes, calculating that he had a scant fifteen minutes to devote to his mental dawdlings, when a thought—not a whole one, but the start of one— came into his mind, and it began with these exact words: “When your dying day comes…”
“What was this thought doing there with the others? How gutless! It was like suddenly remembering, while making love, that he hadn’t paid the phone bill. Not that he was inordinately frightened by the idea of dying; the problem was that six-thirty in the morning was hardly the proper time and place for it. If one started thinking about death at the crack of dawn, certainly by five in the afternoon one would either shoot oneself or jump into the sea with a rock around one’s neck. He managed to prevent that phrase from proceeding any further, blocking its path by counting very fast from one to five thousand, with eyes shut and fists clenched. Then he realized that the only solution was to set about doing the things he needed to do, concentrating on them as though it were a matter of life or death. The following morning was even more treacherous. The first thought that entered his mind was that the fish soup he’d eaten the night before had lacked some seasoning. But which? And at that exact moment, the same accursed thought came back to him: “When your dying day comes…”