Reviews for August Heat (Inspector Montalbano Series #10)

The average rating for August Heat (Inspector Montalbano Series #10) based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-28 00:00:00 Sunwoo Hwang My third Inspector Montalbano mystery. I previously read The Terra-Cotta Dog and The Voice of the Violin. This is a police procedural translated from the Italian. It's a fun read as the Inspector is known for his love of good food both at a local (Sicilian) trattoria and that cooked for him by his maid/cook. His excessive hours and his obsession with his cases tries the patience of his woman friend, so the relationship in on again/off again. He writes letters to himself that help the reader follow the twists and turns of the case. He hates bureaucracy and likes pulling the chain of his idiot superiors as much as they like pulling his. His underlings speak dialect that sounds almost like a Sicilian Brooklyn accent that can get annoying at times. "Says Gasparino Manzella was getting on 'is noives since it was rilly hot 'n all an' a fly was walkin on 'is head which rilly bugged 'im an' so he shot 'im." The story starts on a humorous note when his woman friend asks him to find a rental vacation home for her friends. Montalbano finds what looks like a great place for the younger couple with a young boy but it is soon invaded by roaches, then mice, then spiders. The couple starts to believe that the house is cursed. Then their boy disappears after sliding down a hole into a hidden basement apartment. Montalbano find the missing boy and is momentarily the hero until he announces that there is a trunk down there with a decomposed body in it! Needless to say, their vacation ends. The body is that of a 16-year old girl who went missing six years ago. The hidden basement is simply the way things were done in Sicily - building a big home with a buried basement saves time and money due to complex building codes, permits and taxes. It's much easier to hide it and dig it up later - mea culpa. The construction crew, the foreman, the mafia-affiliated contractor all become suspects. All are reluctantly dragged in for interviews, one by one, by Montalbano and his crew. Meanwhile, while toying with the mafia-affiliated contractor, Montalbano becomes suspicious of a death in an unrelated case. It looks like an Arab construction worker, an illegal immigrant, fell off an unprotected scaffold at a work site and the crew covered up their responsibility in his death by installing railings after the fact and dousing his clothing with alcohol to make it appear he was drunk. This incident provides a second case that the Inspector's department is working simultaneously. It turns out that the deceased girl had a twin sister. The Inspector interviews her - she's 22 years old and drop-dead gorgeous. Suddenly she's in full pursuit of Montalbano (who's 55) and whose woman friend took off on her own vacation. Is this simply the fantasy of a 55-year old man? (Or the author, 81 at the time this book was written.) But it turns out that her pursuit of the Inspector is tied in with the plot and provides a surprising and shocking twist at the end of the book. A good story with a lot of local color of Sicily. And you have to love the mouth-watering food scattered throughout the book: antipasto di mare; passuluna olives, calamari salad and pappanozza (spiced onions and potatoes in a mash), and fine wines. (There are sites featuring recipes from the Montalbano series on both Wordpress and Pinterest) The author just died this year (2019) at age 94. He was best known for this Inspector Montalbano series, I think twenty-six in all, although some of the most recent ones do not yet appear to have been translated into English. The stories were made into a popular TV series in Italy. His hometown, featured under a fictitious name in his novels, has officially appended that name to attract tourists. (See photo) Photo of the author's hometown, Porto Empedocle -Vigata from grandangoloagrigento.it Statue in honor of the author in his hometown from infoagrigento.it Pappanozza from montalbanosfood.files.wordpress.com

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-14 00:00:00 Bethany Walker I whizzed through this in about three hours enjoying an easy read. By chance the only other book i can remember reading in this series was the first one, just a week ago. The Montalbano character hadn't fully taken shape in the first book, but he has here and he feels a bit over-worked to me. And the secondary police characters seem to have become more stereotypes, perhaps as a consequence of the television series. Perhaps writerly fatigue set in with the endless repetition of the enervating effects of high summer heat in Sicily. Some parts of the story telling were unbelievable - like the lack of a fan anywhere in the police station or any one's home. If you live in a climate where summer heat goes over 40 degrees C, you have fans around somewhere to haul out when the heat goes up. It's not just a short term demand with an acute lack of supply. Do I sound a bit grumpy? It's just been 38 degrees here and is going to be around the 40s for the rest of the week. And this is only mid December. It is an El Niño year and we know it will be a bad summer. So the fans are out of storage and the hot weather daily regime of closing and opening windows and doors is well and truly underway.