Andrea Camilleri: The Shape Of Water

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Inspector Salvo Montalbano is an unusual Sicilian official: he doesn't take bribes; he's for the victims. Montalbano is a delight, a cop who shoots his reflection in a window. He employs a cleaner and cook whose sons he has put inside because, despite dire and likely predictions that she will poison him, she is a magnificent cook. Opening the book is an unusual case involving a local big-wig found dead in his car in a mad, carnival place called the Pasture. In Sicily, to die of natural causes is so rare as to be almost unbelievable. And so it proves. Food, farce and mad, bad Sicily. What more could you want?

* Picador, $26.95