The Paper Moon – Andrea Camilleri
Picture this: Sicily, sun-drenched and simmering with secrets. Enter Salvo Montalbano, the inspector who makes existential angst look chic. He’s the man who can parse a crime scene with surgical precision and still agonize over the perfect plate of pasta. For those of us with Mediterranean DNA (opera was inevitable, whether by Italians or Croatians), Salvo is a mood: brilliant, intuitive, and a connoisseur of life’s finer things - yet perpetually irritable, sarcastic, and increasingly alarmed by the creeping shadow of middle age.
This ninth installment in the saga trades the soap opera of Salvo’s personal life for a lean, linear investigation. Livia, his long-suffering girlfriend, breezes through in three lines - blink and you’ll miss her. The case? A grim cocktail of drugs and sexual transgressions: incest, adultery, impotence, coerced abortion, and a police-perpetrated assault. It’s noir with teeth, punctuated by laugh-out-loud moments courtesy of Catarella, the office’s resident agent of chaos.
Camilleri doesn’t shy from biting commentary. Italy under Berlusconi gets skewered, and post-9/11 security rituals are lampooned as hollow theater - ceremonies designed not to protect but to soothe. Think of that next time you watch someone sanitizing a countertop for your peace of mind.
Why read it? Because Salvo is caught between two femmes fatales: Michela the Fury, all danger and heat, and Elena the Cheetah, whose innocence is a weapon. It’s a dance of wits and wills, and Salvo must summon every ounce of cunning to survive.
Dark, funny, and unapologetically sharp - this is Mediterranean noir at its most stylish.
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