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frickative 's review for:
The Track of Sand
by Andrea Camilleri
This was a real non-event of a book. Inspector Montalbano wakes one morning to find a horse beaten to death on the beach outside his home. He spends three hundred pages occasionally investigating illegal horse racing rings, having clandestine trysts in stables and having his home ransacked by burglars, but mainly eating fish courses and admiring picturesque views.
I was given this for my monthly book group, never having read Andrea Camilleri before, and I can't say I ever will again. As the twelfth in a series, there's a lot of assumed knowledge at play. None of the supporting characters are ever really introduced, and they all act and speak like terrible charicatures. Perhaps it's a translation issue, but the way their Italian dialect is written seems like a horrible parody. Our hero Montalbano doesn't seem like a particularly nice chap - he casually cheats on his girlfriend, then later feels sad about it for all of half a page. The ending is utterly bizarre, and look, I'm sure this makes a lovely television series with some spectacular scenery, but it's written like a very lazy script outline and there's just absolutely no substance to it. The whole thing only took about four hours to read, but I couldn't recommend it.
I was given this for my monthly book group, never having read Andrea Camilleri before, and I can't say I ever will again. As the twelfth in a series, there's a lot of assumed knowledge at play. None of the supporting characters are ever really introduced, and they all act and speak like terrible charicatures. Perhaps it's a translation issue, but the way their Italian dialect is written seems like a horrible parody. Our hero Montalbano doesn't seem like a particularly nice chap - he casually cheats on his girlfriend, then later feels sad about it for all of half a page. The ending is utterly bizarre, and look, I'm sure this makes a lovely television series with some spectacular scenery, but it's written like a very lazy script outline and there's just absolutely no substance to it. The whole thing only took about four hours to read, but I couldn't recommend it.