The Scent of the Night

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. Mimì, 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 Montalbano is reluctantly drawn into the case. The secretary's boss, a financial advisor, has vanished along with several billion lire entrusted to him by the good citizens of Vigàta. Also missing is the advisor's young colleague, whose uncle just happens to be building a house on the site of Inspector Montalbano's very favourite olive tree . . .

Ably abetted by his loyal and eccentric team, Montalbano, the food-loving, commitment-phobic inspector, returns for another delicious investigation served up in vintage Camilleri style.

The Scent of the Night is followed by the seventh book in the series, Rounding the Mark.

PRAISE FOR THE SERIES

"A magnificent series of novels" Sunday Times

"There's a deliciously playful quality to the mysteries Andrea Camilleri writes about a lusty Sicilian police detective named Salvo Montalbano." New York Times Book Review

"Camilleri as crafty and charming a writer as his protagonist is an investigator." The Washington Post

"The books are full of sharp, precise characterizations and with subplots that make Montalbano endearingly human ... Like the antipasti that Montalbano contentedly consumes, the stories are light and easily consumed, leaving one eager for the next course." New York Journal of Books

"This series is distinguished by Camilleri's remarkable feel for tragicomedy, expertly mixing light and dark in the course of producing novels that are both comforting and disturbing." Booklist