The Shape of Water (1994)
"I had a little friend, a peasant boy, who was younger than me. I was about ten. One day I saw that my friend had put a bowl, a cup, a teapot, and a square milk carton on the edge of a well, had filled them all with water, and was looking at them attentively.
"'What are you doing?' I asked him. And he answered me with a question in turn.
"'What shape is water?'
"'Water doesn't have any shape!' I said laughing. 'It takes the shape you give it.'"
This first mystery in the Inspector Salvo Montalbano series introduces us to the sardonic but determined policeman, the imaginary Sicilian seacoast town of Vigáta, and a cast of colorful characters. Mr. Camilleri's Sicily is just as thoroughly corrupt as you'd expect it to be and no one much seems to mind, other than Montalbano, who isn't about to let everyone else's eagerness to look away stop him from solving the murder of a respected local politician. The opportunity to let it slide by is ample, as it's not even apparent at first that a crime was committed, but the fact that the body was found in a trash yard that's a notorious pick-up spot for whores is sufficiently out of the victim's public character that the Inspector starts digging.
The particular strengths of the book are the setting that Camilleri brings to life -- not least by taunting us with the vittles Montalbano enjoys -- and the witty character of the Inspector, as well as his becoming determination to see justice done, even if he has to bend the rules himself on occasion.
(Reviewed:27-Sep-05)
Grade: (A-)
