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THE VOICE OF THE VIOLIN
by Andrea Camilleri
Picador, January 2006
224 pages
7.99GBP
ISBN: 0330492993


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The somewhat irascible Inspector Salvo Montalbano is not having a good day even before the police car in which he is travelling crashes into a Twingo parked by the side of the road. No one in the house outside which the car was parked is at home so Montalbano leaves a note under the windscreen wiper.

Later in the day, when the note is apparently undisturbed and no one has rung the police station to complain about the crash, an uneasy feeling tempts the inspector to a break and enter into the Twingo's house, where he finds the corpse of a young and beautiful woman. He must fabricate circumstances which will enable the body to be 'discovered' legitimately.

There are no clothes nor any objects which might identify the woman but once identification has been made, Montalbano finds himself removed from the case, which is given to the Flying Squad. Captain Panzacchi soon claims the case has been solved and the murderer, a young, retarded man known to be obsessed with Michela Licalzi, the deceased, has been shot while threatening the police with a hand grenade.

Montalbano has every reason not to believe the neatly presented solution and soon resumes his own examination of the case.

The reader can sympathise with Montalbano. He is having personal as well as professional problems. His girlfriend, who lives not in Sicily but in the north, is being skittish, the lad whom they intend adopting has other ideas about with whom he would like to live, Salvo himself is attracted to the best friend of the murdered woman and, perhaps most earth-shattering, his subordinate Catarella, who invariably mangles the language and misdelivers telephone messages, is seemingly being converted to received Italian by the computer course to which, in a spirit of mischief, Montalbano has sent him.

Perhaps the author relies a trifle too heavily on what he attributes to intuition for his protagonist. I am not too sure I was satisfied by Montalbano's learning the truth of the matter from music, in which he perceives the voice of the dead woman. Even so, an argument for the use of the piece as a simple inspiration for the inspector's subconscious could be made.

The characterisations could have been more convincingly done since the goodies (apart from the delicious Catarella) seem to speak with one voice to impart a single thought. I was in two minds, also, about the validity of a police inspector having as a friend a journalist to whom he shows special consideration in handing out statements (although things may be done differently in Sicily). Then, too, whenever I saw the name 'Mimi Augello', Montalbano's (male) second in command, I found it difficult to suppress an impulse to wonder if his tiny hand was frozen.

Like Donna Leon, whose mysteries are set rather further north, Camilleri places heavy emphasis on corruption within official circles. Unlike Leon, he doesn't attribute only likeable characteristics to his protagonist.

This is a charming addition to the annals of crime fiction. I trust it won't be too long before further Montalbano adventures are translated into English so that this reviewer, for one, may form a definite opinion about the series.

Reviewed by Denise Pickles, January 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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