The Age of Doubt by Andrea Camilleri

The Age of Doubt by Andrea Camilleri
Buy The Age of Doubt by Andrea Camilleri at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Crime
Reviewer: Sue Magee
Summary: It's the fourteenth in the series but still a remarkably good read and worth buying because you'll read it again to see how he did it.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 288	Date: November 2012
Publisher: Mantle
ISBN: 978-1447203315
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The rain was dreadful and when he left for work Montalbano had only driven a matter of yards before he found that part of the road had been washed away, but it led to an encounter with a strange young woman, who - in turn - made Montalbano curious about a yacht in the harbour. He should have been concentrating on the corpse found floating in a dinghy at the harbour mouth but it was the Vanna which seemed to keep surfacing in his thoughts. Well, when he wasn't thinking about Lieutenant Belladonna - Laura - at the Harbour authority that is. She wasn't strange at all.

Montalbano's in his late fifties and even in his most introspective moments he can't work out how he feels about Laura. He knows that he's obsessive, that he's never felt like this before - even when he was a teenager, but is it love? Laura has a fiance - but is it possible that she might feel the same way about him? Is it providential that his current case is largely centred on the harbour? Who is the corpse in the dinghy, whose face has been disfigured and what is his connection with the owners of the yacht and the neighbouring motorboat?

Mimi Augelo, Montalbano's second in command, gets more than he bargained for - or his wife would have appreciated - when he's detailed to investigate Livia Giovannini, the, er, rather forward owner of the yacht. And Catarella - on the reception desk - contrives once, just once, to get someone's name right but otherwise continues to mangle whatever language it is that he's speaking. Montalbano, on the other hand, is all too precise in what he says about a wife and son he doesn't have. If you've read about Montalbano before then you'll meet a lot of old friends.

Whenever I reach the end of one of Camilleri's books I'm always surprised that there was so much to the story. The book looks relatively slight - certainly when you compare it to some of the tomes which crime writers produce nowadays - but there's still plenty of meat on the plot. I think the secret is that Camilleri trusts his readers to paint their own mental pictures and offers little in the way of description or exposition. Characters, places - even the food - all come off the page with remarkably little said about them.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy of the book to the Bookbag.

You could read this as standalone and I doubt that the order in which you read the books would make a lot of difference to your enjoyment of the series, but why not give yourself a treat and start back at the beginning?

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