Inspector Montalbano Books in Order

After a worker at a shipyard apparently hangs himself, Montalbano clashes with the arrogant new owner and notices a sleek schooner, the Halcyon, hovering offshore. Investigating the ship's enigmatic cook and passengers draws him into a floating world of financial schemes and criminal deals.

Before dawn Montalbano receives a wrong-number call from a cheerful man named Riccardino, asking where he is. Hours later Riccardino is shot dead outside a bar. As the inspector investigates, he is interrupted by phone calls from the Author himself in a playful, uneasy final case.

Mimì Augello escapes a lover's returning husband by climbing into the flat below, where he stumbles over a corpse in the dark. When theatre director Carmelo Catalanotti is later found murdered, Montalbano mines rehearsal notes, acting exercises and a new play to untangle the truth.

A Swedish TV crew descends on Vigàta to film a period drama, asking locals for old home movies. One man brings reels that show the same crumbling wall filmed every year on the same day, while a nearby school faces an attack. Montalbano chases answers in both past and present.

Several young women are briefly abducted on their way home from work, drugged, locked in a car boot and released unharmed in the countryside. When an electronics shop burns and its owner disappears, Montalbano suspects a link between the strange kidnappings and a more serious crime.

As overloaded boats of migrants land night after night, Montalbano and his team help process the exhausted arrivals. In the chaos, a respected seamstress is found stabbed in her workshop, and the inspector must juggle humanitarian emergency, small town gossip and a very personal murder.

During a punishing spell of rain, a construction manager is found murdered inside a half-flooded tunnel at a building site. The case drags Montalbano through a swamp of rigged contracts, political favours and organised crime that threatens to swallow anyone who steps in too deep.

Set in the 1980s, this collection of eight stories follows a younger Montalbano as he tackles arson, drug smuggling, missing women and a shooting on a fishing boat. The cases show his instincts forming and his stubborn style already colliding with official procedure.

A wealthy businessman is discovered dead at his beach house, shot and apparently poisoned. As Montalbano uncovers the man's secret life of blackmail and exploitation, he realises there is no shortage of suspects, and that justice for some victims may look very different from the law.

A supermarket robbery that looks staged ends with the manager found hanging in his office. Soon after, a young woman is murdered in the flat of a powerful politician's son. Montalbano must connect these crimes while navigating the tight embrace of local politics and the Mafia.

Two small bombs explode outside empty warehouses, one tied to a drug dealer, while Montalbano's flirtatious neighbour Liliana keeps drawing him into her complicated life. Surrounded by mixed signals and planted evidence, he must work out who is pulling the strings and why.

Shaken by doubts about his long relationship with Livia, Montalbano falls under the spell of Marian, a chic gallery owner. At the same time he investigates an armed robbery, suspicious art deals and a weapons trail that leads into the countryside with tragic results.

A wave of meticulous burglaries hits Vigàta's wealthier homes, and their ringleader sends mocking letters signed by Mr Z. One victim, Angelica Cosulich, looks uncannily like Montalbano's teenage crush, and his infatuation threatens to cloud his judgement as the case turns deadly.

An elderly brother and sister fire rifles into a crowded square, and inside their flat Montalbano finds religious clutter and a battered sex doll. Soon afterwards he receives taunting rhymed clues for a so-called treasure hunt that turns from game into deadly obsession.

On the eve of a holiday with Livia, Montalbano watches a seagull perform a strange dance before collapsing on the sand. Moments later he learns that his trusted colleague Fazio is missing, and his search pulls him into a brutal world of smuggling and extortion.

This collection gathers twenty one stories that trace Montalbano's career from his earliest days in Vigàta onward. Short, sharp cases involving missing lovers, staged suicides, odd late night encounters and metafictional jokes offer a compact tour of the inspector's world.

After dreaming of his own funeral, Montalbano is called to the docks, where a luxury yacht and a mysterious speedboat are tied to a dead man found in a dinghy. Diamonds, shady shipping and a brilliant Coast Guard officer unsettle both his heart and his loyalties.

A rain-soaked field of clay yields a bag filled with dismembered human remains. As Montalbano struggles to identify the victim, he must also deal with his deputy's suspicious behaviour and clues that echo an old Biblical story about a potter's field.

Montalbano wakes to find a bloodied racehorse lying dead outside his house. When the carcass vanishes, leaving only hoofprints in the sand and a trashed home, he is drawn into the world of illegal racing, gambling and Mafia attempts to muscle into the sport.

Trapped in Vigàta during a suffocating August, Montalbano hosts Livia and her friends in a rented beach house. When their young son vanishes and a hidden cellar reveals an old crime, the inspector must solve a case that mixes sun, jealousy and a buried girl.

The body of a young woman is found at a dump with a small tattoo of a sphinx's wings on her shoulder. Tracking that mark leads Montalbano into a murky charity, missing Eastern European girls and a case that strains his relationship with Livia even further.

A pharmacist is found shot in his office with his trousers around his ankles, apparently caught during an affair. Montalbano works through layers of lies told by the victim's family, lovers and colleagues, and is forced to confront his own memories of childhood.

Still recovering from a gunshot wound, Montalbano is called back to work when a young woman appears to have been kidnapped. As he unpicks a ransom note, family secrets and staged clues, he must rely on patience rather than speed to catch a careful spider.

Disillusioned by politics after protests in Genoa, Montalbano considers quitting until a morning swim brings him face to face with a corpse. The case leads to a hit and run, a dead boy and a human trafficking ring that tests his ethics as much as his skills.

Half of Vigàta's pensioners have entrusted their savings to a charismatic financial adviser who vanishes with the money. Shut out of the official inquiry, Montalbano pursues his own line, following hurt investors, missing employees and a trail that reeks of fraud.

A young womaniser is gunned down outside his apartment block and an elderly couple disappears after a bus trip to the shrine at Tindari. When Montalbano realises they lived in the same building, he uncovers a link to the brutal methods of the new Mafia.

A minor car accident outside an isolated villa leads Montalbano to break in and discover a young woman lying naked and dead on her bed. As he probes her tangled love life, he clashes with new superiors and a web of privilege that wants the case buried.

A weary Mafia boss asks Montalbano to stage his arrest, a supermarket robbery makes no economic sense, and an old man dies in a strange car crash. The trail leads to a hidden cave, smuggled weapons and two lovers' bodies guarded by a terra-cotta dog.

Off Sicily's coast a trawler is machine gunned by a patrol boat, while in Vigàta a businessman is stabbed in his lift. Montalbano's only link between the cases is a Tunisian cleaner and her small son, a boy who steals classmates' snacks to survive.

When a prominent politician is found dead in a car at a notorious roadside haunt, officials want the case closed as a heart attack. Inspector Montalbano suspects something uglier and digs into a tangle of sex, construction deals and quiet blackmail.