The Sicilian Method

Book excerpt: A troubling murder investigation may see Montalbano find his answers on a theatre's stage in The Sicilian Method, Andrea Camilleri's twenty-sixth novel in the Inspector Montalbano mystery series. 'Even the contents of his fridge are described with the wit and gusto that make this narrator the best company in crime fiction today' – Guardian Mimi Augello is visiting his lover when the woman's husband unexpectedly returns to the apartment. Hurriedly he climbs out the window and into the downstairs apartment – but finds himself swinging from one danger to another. In the dark, he sees a body lying on the bed. Shortly afterwards another body is found, and the victim is Carmelo Catalanotti. A director of bourgeois dramas, he had a harsh reputation for the methods he developed for his actors: digging into their complexes to unleash their talent, a traumatic experience for all. Are the two deaths connected? Catalanotti scrupulously kept notes and comments on all the actors he worked with – as well as strange notebooks full of figures, dates and names. Inspector Montalbano finds all of Catalanotti's dossiers and plays, the notes on the characters and the notes on his final drama, Dangerous Turn. Indeed, it is in the theatre where he feels the solution lies . . . 'One of fiction’s greatest detectives' – Daily Mail