Montalbano begins to suspect that this wasn’t just a case of a heart attack at a very inopportune time though, and he gets grudging permission to take just a little more time and investigate just a little more thoroughly. He’s strongly encouraged in fact to “rubber stamp” the explanation that Luparello died of a heart attack and cover up the news of the notorious area where the body was found. So Inspector Salvo Montalbano is asked to keep the investigation as quiet and brief as possible.

The discovery of his body in very compromising circumstances will get a lot of media attention and cause a great deal of unpleasantness for Luparello’s family and for the party. But when the opportunity presented itself Luperallo emerged as the party leader. The dead man turns out to be Silvio Luparello, also known as “the engineer.” Luparello was a successful businessman who had managed to stay in the background as one of his political party’s “power brokers” for quite a long time. Early one morning, two men assigned to cleaning duty in the Pasture discover a dead man in an abandoned car, a man who’d obviously had a sexual encounter just before his death. The Pasture is overseen by a powerful local gangster named Gegè Gullatto, who runs several thriving “business operations” there including drugs and prostitution. This novel begins in the Pasture, an area outside the Sicilian city of Vigatà. He takes it all with the accepting attitude that one needs to survive in an often bleak and impoverished part of the world. The inspector is drawn into the shadowy world of Sicilian politics as he discovers affiliations made between bureaucratic adversaries, meets with promiscuous beauties, and finds corruption that might even reach into the Church. But the inspector senses that not all is as it seems and determinedly launches a full investigation.While pursuing the case, Montalbano encounters a number of bizarre and comical characters, from an elderly schoolteacher driven mad by his 80-year-old wife's 'cheating' to a former classmate who's now an intellectual pimp. Hoping to avoid an embarrassing situation, Montalbano's superiors expect him to close the case quickly.

When a local politician is found dead in his car, half naked, in a seedy neighborhood known for prostitution and drug trafficking, it's assumed that he died of natural causes in the middle of a sexual escapade. The Shape of Water is his first Inspector Salvo Montalbano adventure to be translated into English. Bestselling Italian author Andrea Camilleri - one of the Hound's greatest living crime writers - has built a massive international following for his sardonic Sicilian mysteries featuring a listless, dejected, nonconformist protagonist who somehow always accomplishes his duty in spite of himself.

The shape of water montalbano