The first three books in the Inspector Montalbano crime series - now a major BBC4 TV series

Sicily, 1880. When a stranger arrives in Vigata, the town's inhabitants immediately become unsettled. It seems the young man, Fofo, is the son of a local peasant legendary for his home-grown medicines; a man who was murdered many years before. Fofo opens his own pharmacy in Vigata and his remedies are sought by many. But he soon finds himself entangled with the local nobility: Don Filippo - a philandering marchese set on producing a new heir, his long-suffering wife Donna Matilde, his eccentric elderly father Don Federico, his son Federico and beautiful daughter Ntonto above all. But it won't...

The Overnight Kidnapper is the twenty-third Inspector Montalbano mystery, from the international bestselling author Andrea Camilleri. After a hectic morning involving two rather irritating cases of mistaken identity, Inspector Montalbano finally arrives in his office ready find out what's troubling Vigata this week. What he discovers is unnerving. A woman on her way home from work has been held up at gunpoint, chloroformed and kidnapped, but then released just hours later - unharmed and with all her possessions - into the open countryside. Later that day, Montalbano hears from Enzo, the...

The Other End of the Line is the twenty-fourth Inspector Montalbano mystery from the international bestselling author Andrea Camilleri. In Inspector Montalbano's coastal town of Vigata, a surge of migrants have been coming in by boat, and all the town's hands are on deck to help the arrivals. At the heart of the scene are the police - on the lookout for the people smugglers responsible - and long night-shifts are rendering Inspector Montalbano and his officers exhausted. Then one night, while Montalbano is enduring yet another gruelling stint at the port, a separate crime is committed...

The Scent of the Night is the sixth comic detective novel in the Inspector Montalbano series by Andrea Camilleri. Montalbano learned how hard it was to put on a wetsuit while in a dinghy speeding over a sea that wasn't exactly calm. Mimi, at the helm, looked tense and worried. "Getting seasick?" the inspector asked him at one point. "No. Just sick of myself." "Why?" "Because every now and then I realize what a stupid shit I am to go along with some of your brilliant ideas." When an angry octogenarian holds a terrified and lovelorn secretary at gunpoint, Inspector...

The fifth in the hit Italian crime series by Andrea Camilleri, Excursion to Tindari is a darkly comic detective story featuring Inspector Montalbano. Maybe a phrase, a line, a hint somewhere would reveal a reason, any reason, for the elderly couple's disappearance . . . A young Don Juan is found murdered in front of his apartment building early one morning, and an elderly couple is reported missing after an excursion to the ancient site of Tindari - two seemingly unrelated cases for Inspector Montalbano to solve amid the daily complications of life at Vigata police headquarters. ...

Never has Inspector Montalbano's character - a unique blend of humor, cynicism, compassion, earthiness, and love of good food - been more compelling than in Andrea Camilleri's third Montalbano novel, The Snack Thief. When an elderly man is stabbed to death in an elevator and a crewman on an Italian fishing trawler is machine-gunned by a Tunisian patrol boat off Sicily's coast, only Inspector Montalbano suspects a link between the two incidents. His investigation leads to the beautiful Karima, an impoverished house cleaner and sometime prostitute, whose young son steals other school...