The Track of Sand

I think of this book in two ways: 1) it is yet another kind of standard-fare volume in Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Salvo Montalbano series, and 2) that is part of his continuing love letter to Sicily. The story is kinda blah, though it begins with Salvo dreaming of a half horse/half woman and then......more

Odd story. My first Inspector Montalbano. He wakes up and finds a dead horse on the beach outside his house that has been beaten to death. He calls his men to the location and while they have coffee at his house the horse carcass disappears. There is a lot of humor but I don’t like the way the Inspe......more

This was a real non-event of a book. Inspector Montalbano wakes one morning to find a horse beaten to death on the beach outside his home. He spends three hundred pages occasionally investigating illegal horse racing rings, having clandestine trysts in stables and having his home ransacked by burgla......more

I think Camilleri gets better as he and his character ages. Some of the chapters in this outing are quite astute dissections of local social mores and classes delivered with an almost Dickensian verve. The plot is complicated big time. But who reads Camilleri for the plot? In fact, there is more exp......more

I really enjoyed this installment in the Inspector Montalbano series. The storyline centering around the death of a horse tugged at my heart strings. I love the usual characters and descriptions of food/Italian scenery that enters all of the books in the series. I struggled to put this book down, and......more