I’m back with another book review, and this time it’s “A Voice in the Night” by Andrea Camilleri! Here’s a summary so we know what it’s about:
“Montalbano investigates a robbery at a supermarket, a standard case that takes a spin when manager Guido Borsellino is later found hanging in his office. Was it a suicide? The inspector and the coroner have their doubts, and further investigation leads to the director of a powerful local company.
Meanwhile, a girl is found brutally murdered in Giovanni Strangio’s apartment—Giovanni has a flawless alibi, and it’s no coincidence that Michele Strangio, president of the province, is his father. Weaving together these two crimes, Montalbano realizes that he’s in a difficult spot where political power is enmeshed with the mafia underworld.”
This book is definitely a mixture of both the humour and detective genres. All of the characters, though they didn’t get much development, were fun to read due to their sassy attitudes towards each other and the whole situation they were stuck in. The actual plot of solving the mystery was made so much more exciting because of how the characters reacted. Montalbano was especially funny to read because of this.
The actual plot of trying to find out who the murderer was felt a bit overshadowed by all the humour, however, and sometimes it even slowed down the plot. However, how the other characters finally figured out who murdered the poor victim in the apartment was pretty interesting to read.
If there was something I really found interesting, it was the parts of the book where Montalbano was griping over aging and the consequences of it. Given that he’s nearing his sixties in this book, it makes a lot of sense to talk about this issue.
When it came to the continuity of the book, I had no idea that this was a book in a pretty long series of books when reading the book at the time (this is the 20th book in the series!). There was probably some information in the book that would have made more sense if I read the books taking place before this one, and so I can’t say that I understand everything.
Overall, I would rate this book 3 out of 5 stars. I would definitely recommend reading it if you like humour and mystery, though I think some information would have made sense if you read the books that take place before this one as I just mentioned earlier.