Inspector Montalbano #8

The Patience of the Spider – Andrea Camilleri

The eighth mystery with Inspector Salvo Montalbano as the protagonist is set in Vigata, Sicily in the early 2000s.

It starts with our hero convalescing from a gun-shot wound to his shoulder suffered near the end of the previous novel Rounding the Mark. He keeps waking up at 3:27:40, the exact time he was shot. So PTSD, despite the proximity of his loyal long-suffering GF Livia. She has left her home in Boccadasse, near Genoa, using up her holiday time off to nurse him back to health. They bicker but don’t meet head on elephants in the corner like her inability to cook (an agony to foodie Salvo) or his inability to understand how his selfishness and cluelessness drive Livia crazy.

The series nemesis Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi orders Montalbano back in the saddle for an abduction case. On her way home on her moped, a college girl was snatched by kidnappers. Montalbano does not head the investigation but at least his colleague Inspector Filippo (Fifi) Minutolo sides with the angels. A fatuous bureaucrat, Bonetti-Alderighi says Minutolo ought to be an expert in kidnappings because he's a Calabrian from Messina. In another satirical passage Montalbano plays pranks played on idiot TV newscaster Pippo Ragonese, who blamed the kidnapping on “illegal immigrants.”

Montalbano knows kidnapping is committed either for money or for assault which often culminates in murder. He worries the end will be murder when he sees for himself what everybody knows: the victim’s family is not well off, and in fact, living in a dingy villa, with the victim’s mother slowly dying of a chronic disease.

When they finally put their heads up, the kidnappers reveal a savvy approach to the media. They send every message and photo not only to the family but also to local TV stations in order to inflame public opinion. Cleverly manipulated, the public loudly demands that the ransom be paid by the only wealthy person in the family, the victim's uncle, a dishonest businessman with political ambitions. When the uncle at first hesitates to pony up the ransom, indignant members of the public assault his trophy wife in a parking lot and burn two of his trucks.

Montalbano follows the investigation from the sidelines and interviews persons of interest in the shadows. However, he has the impression that something doesn't seem right, that some questions haven't been asked, some answers have been missed. In a fine passage, on his veranda at his Marinella house near the sea, looking at a spider's web, he realizes even the cliché of a “web of deceit” can be helpful. He has a vision of brains behind the kidnapping. Camilleri gives a nod to logic and rationality in thinking, but he also puts into action Montalbano’s feeling, intuition, and neuroses, not to mention his synesthesia, his ability see smells and taste shapes. No wonder Montalbano solves cases with creative leaps of imagination.

Camilleri's skill and mastery managed to surprise me once again: he manages to write an excellent detective story without hinging the plot on a murder. He paints, with few characters and only a ghost of a plot, a fresco of a family dragged into the drama of the kidnapping of their daughter, though already burdened by the mother's illness and reduced to poverty due to family conflict.

Humor lightens the serious plot elements. Clownish Officer Catarella and silly spats between Montalbano and Livia provide comic relief. Camilleri also satirizes the corruption, incompetence, and sheer stupidity of public functionaries.