Sunday, 10 October 2010
August Heat, the tenth volume in the Montalbano series turns up the heat in more ways than one. Right in the dog days of summer, Mimi Augello has been forced to change vacation arrangements, which in turn throws Montalbano's plans to join Livia away from Vigata into disarray.
No problem, as far as Livia is concerned. She'll come to Sicily, and this time, since Montalbano will obviously be busy working on the murder of the week she'll bring her friend Laura, Laura's husband Guido and their son Bruno for company. All they'll need is a house for the family, and everything will be fine.
Montalbano's suggestion that, given the heat, local killers will wait till autumn and he’ll have plenty of time for her fails to dissuade her from the plan to rent accommodation, and it’s a minor miracle when an ideal house in a spectacular and conveniently isolated setting turns up well after all the other available rental properties had been leased.
Well, it seemed ideal. After a succession of nocturnal plagues - cockroaches, mice and spiders - hyperactive toddler Bruno and Ruggero, the (adopted) family cat, disappear, which brings Montalbano onto the scene charged with the responsibility of finding him.
Having established that the boy has ended up at the wrong end of a narrow shaft hidden under the beach house, Montalbano discovers that the shaft actually leads into a concealed illegal basement apartment under the house, and inside the apartment there's the naked body of a murdered girl that's been there for six years.
Since the visitors' presence on site will complicate matters, Salvo manipulates the situation so that they leave, and sets out to solve the murder mystery, an investigation based around a series of interviews with shady builders, property speculators, and estate agents, who've been engaged in a predictable array of dodgy practices.
The temperature accounts for the fact that most of the activity involves Montalbano, Fazio, would-be Indianapolis driver Gallo and the inimitable Catarella, whose linguistic mangling goes from strength to strength. Presumably everyone else. like Mimi Augello, is away on vacation.
As a result there isn't much in the way of character development for someone who comes to August Heat without prior knowledge of the characters. Then again, in this case there doesn't need to be.
Montalbano conducts the investigation, Fazio is there to gather detail and bounce ideas off, Gallo's role is to move Montalbano from Point A to Point B with uncomfortable rapidity, and Catarella, as always, answers the phone, mans the front desk and provides linguistic comic relief.
Throughout the investigation there's blistering summer heat, which forces multiple changes of clothes daily and reduces Montalbano to sitting in his office in his underwear, but the biggest complication is Salvo's attraction to the victim’s drop-dead gorgeous twin sister.
We already know Montalbano is easily tempted, but in most cases loyalty to Livia keeps him on the straight and narrow. This time, however, with her friends safely home Livia escapes aboard a yacht and refuses to answer his calls.
It doesn't take much to work out the murderer, but it's not going to be easy to get a confession out of him. In the end Salvo is manipulated into a risky and extremely dodgy ruse to confront the killer, and ends up a spectator in the finale.
In nine cases out of ten, or perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred Montalbano's mixture of cunning, intelligence, intuition and inspiration would see the pieces fall into place the way he wants them but this time he's been out-manoeuvred by someone with their own agenda.
At fifty-five is he approaching the point where he's past it?