Wings of the Sphinx [Hardcover]

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330507648
• ISBN-13: 978-0330507646
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 1.5 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,165,344 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrea Camilleri is the author of the spectacularly successful Montalbano mystery series and many other novels set in nineteenth-century Sicily. His Montalbano novels have been made into an Italian TV series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Va bene!, December 30, 2009

By 

James E. Tenuto (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wings of the Sphinx (Inspector Montalbano Mysteries) (Paperback)

Inspector Silvio Montalbano is feeling every one of his fifty-six years. In this eleventh installment in the Inspector Montalbano series, author Andrea Camilleri neither disappoints nor dazzles, instead turning in the journeyman performance expected. If anything, Montalbano, "meteoropathic" (he is profoundly influenced by the weather) inspector in Vigata, a fictional town in Siciliy, goes through his paces: his extravagant lunches at Enzo's, his tortuous conversations with Catarella, the desk sergeant who is the master of the malaprop, his walk to the end of the jetty to contemplate life, his whiskies on his veranda, his perplexing love-life with long time paramour Livia...it's all here. Yet fresh, nuanced.

Montalbano actually flees the scene of the crime that launches this book, the discovery of the body of a young woman, shot in the face and discarded in the city dump, naked. He can no longer deal with death visited upon the young. He is assailed, as are we all, with television's daily diet of death and dismemberment, war and violence visited on young and old. Montalbano still performs his amazing leaps of logic, his finely honed intuition often delivering the necessary bridge needed to solve a crime or determine a motive, yet in this book he leaves much of the work to his more-than-capable assistants, Mimi Augello and Fazio. His investigation wanders through a Catholic charity, private homes, the remains of a burned-out retail business, and prison.

As always, Camilleri creates a sense of place and sets it firmly in time. Through Montalbano he takes his obligatory swipes at Silvio Berlusconi, the web of the powerful who seem to trample through every investigation, and the Sicilian bureaucracy,

While the series isn't great literature, it is a great series. Camilleri keeps his characters fresh, building on them in each subsequent work. You feel what Montalbano feels, the frustration, the powerlessness, the emotions of growing older and wiser but no less effective against the powers that be.

When we visited Italy a couple of years ago I wanted to purchase the first book in the series, The Shape of Water (La forma dell' acqua) in Italian. When I walked into a bookstore in Rome and asked for the title, the clerk beamed and shouted "Mafia! Mafia!" Camilleri's a well-known and respected writer in Italy, with the series turned into a television program.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insults & insights in Sicily, January 1, 2010

By 

Patto (Vermont) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wings of the Sphinx (Inspector Montalbano Mysteries) (Paperback)

I pounce on any new Montalbano mystery, and have to fight my husband to keep possession. Every book is a treat. The setting is Sicily, where we expect plenty of scandals and skullduggery - and Camilleri delivers.

In this book, Inspector Montalbano at 56 is having a crisis with his long-distance girlfriend Livia, while carrying on his usual lifestyle. He's consuming huge quantities of fabulous Sicilian food, making obscene wisecracks to superiors and stowing half-smoked cigarettes in his burnt-out jacket pocket. He's also digging too deeply into a case that's sure to bring trouble.

A twenty-something woman has been found naked in an illegal dump with her face shot off. The main clue to her identity is the Sphinx moth tattooed on her shoulder blade. Montalbano eventually connects the victim, who is Russian, to an association called Benevolence that help young women imported from other countries escape prostitution. Montalbano suspects that Benevolence is hiding bad things behind a good cause.

This is a political hot potato, since Benevolence naturally enough has attracted a lot of support from powerful people.

But it's not so much the crimes and their solutions that make Camilleri great fun to read. It's the wacky atmosphere in the police station, with Montalbano at war with the system and his desk sergeant Catarella garbling every phone message and mangling every name. And it's the drama and colorful language that seem to surround every human interaction.

Montalbano covers a lot of ground in his investigations, despite the fact that the government can't afford gasoline for the squad cars. Camilleri delights in portraying scandalous goings-on in Sicily.

Montalbano fans who like to reconstruct the inspector's favorite dishes will find detailed and daunting instructions for making 'mpanata di maiali on page 159.

I'd suggest that the Montalbano mysteries be consumed entire and in order for the fullest enjoyment.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of best in the Salvo Montalbano series, January 3, 2010

By 

Blue in Washington "Barry Ballow" (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wings of the Sphinx (Inspector Montalbano Mysteries) (Paperback)

Inspector Salvo Montalbano knows his territory--the Sicilian town of Vigata and environs--like the back of his hand, so when criminal activity occurs, he usually has some idea of who might be involved and why. In "The Wings of the Sphinx," another "slaughter of the innocent" has occurred--a beautiful young woman has been shot and her body discarded on a garbage heap. The increasingly world-weary Montalbano finds the crime almost more than he can stomach and starts again to consider retirement from the police. His dark mood is amplified by a crisis in his relationship with long-time girlfriend Livia--a relationship that has been demanding some kind of definition for some time.

Eventually, Montalbano sorts through the professional challenges, uncovering some of the usual venal conspiring amongst leaders of the community, as well as more banal personal failings by the town's lesser lights. As always, author Camilleri gives the reader an insightful exposition of the good and bad in his native Sicily, but manages to end his story on the positive side of the human ledger. Along the way, there is plenty of cynicism, bombast, humor, serious dining on Sicilian cuisine and an inventive and serpentine story line.

Great reading. Bring on the next one.