The Snack Thief begins when a Tunisian immigrant, while on sea aboard a fishing boat is gunned down. Salvu refuses to get involved in that case as another body is found inside the elevator of a residential building. The two cases gets connected later as Salvu finds himself in front of a mystery involving characters ranging from a snack thief to an international criminal.

Camilleri, though used international politics in this book, kept it minimum and thus didn’t turn the book into a hardcore spy thriller. Rather he used the backdrop of international terrorism to create a piece of crime fiction which had a simple plot, and the flow of which wasn’t to bumpy. The book never entered the zone where the plot gets too twisted to follow; rather it maintained calmness throughout, with liberal sprinklings of twists here and there.

The book like the others from Camilleri weren’t devoid of humour. Paras which contained scenes of Salvu reading the newspaper and going through the headlines, though brutal, still brought laughter to the reader. These scenes return in every book, and the way in which the crimes are described makes them funny each time. Such is the quality of Andrea Camilleri as a writer.

Once in a while I land myself with a book that helps me in reassuring myself that all is well with crime writing and THE FROZEN DEAD by Bernard Minier was one of those. All along I have maintained that what I look for most in a Mystery or a thriller is the plot. Most of the times my ratings depend upon the pace and the tightness of the plot, and added to those two very important aspect, I also look for twists. Not someone to shy away from a generous offering, I love my twists especially when they are strewn liberally all over the book.

Right from the beginning when a headless dead horse is found hanging, through the brutal murder of another man, right upto the end where he kept his last twist alive, Minier wrote a book that was pretty impossible to not to finish at one go. And boy did he almost turn this piece of crime writing into a horror novel. The use of the secluded landscape, the chilly weather, and the “madhouse” he created an atmosphere where I got goosebumps while reading. And I live in a tropical country. Not for a long time had I been so involved in a book I was reading. The last instance that comes to mind was a duo experience of BLUE HEAVEN by C.J. Box and another brilliant French effort IRENE from Pierre Lemaittre. And now this.

I guess the only aspect where Minier followed the well trodden path is while developing martin Servaz. He was divorced, grumpy, middle aged and overweight. A pretty standard character who solves an extraordinary crime. But, one this that did make Servaz a bit different from other fictional policemen was the fact that he felt frightened when the situation was frightening. He wasn’t made into a Superman with no fright and all gloom.

All in all a definite entry into my top Mysteries of all time. The pace of the plot, the twists, the atmosphere, the mad house and its inhabitants all made this book an experience to cherish.

3.5 Stars

17.10.2014 to 20.10.2014

THE SHAPE OF WATER, the first Andrea Camilleri book I had read was fun to read. It was fast, the plot without being mind lowing was steady, and Salvu Montalbano without being irritating was grumpy and a wise crack. My second experience wasn’t any less. EXCURSION TO TINDARI featured the same Montalbano, grumpy and witty, the plot was equally fast, but the crime and the mystery surrounding it wasn’t as strong as I would have liked it to be. But the style of Camilleri’s writing kept the book moving, and thankfully there was never a dull moment.

This is a series I am falling in love with pretty fast. The setting is exotic, the writing is funny and the cases without being gory are brutal which gets solved by a grumpy witty detective. A must read for any crime fiction lover.

What were the publishers thinking when the published the second instalment in the trilogy before they decided to translate and publish the first??? They were thinking right in doing so. Why?? Will come to that. Before that a bit of the plot, where a serial killer is on a killing spree with mutilated victims strewn all around. He kills them, tortures them, and uses classic crime fiction novels as his point of reference on torture methods and settings. As far as the basic premise of his crime and modus operandi goes he is clichéd to the core, with violence and madness mixed with the usual serial killer antics. Camille gets involved in the case and for those who have read Alex, will know gets involves personally too.

Now the publishers thought right because Alex is a far better Crime novel than Irene. If seen from a purely Crime Fiction POV Alex offered a lot of newness, ranging from the plot, the victims modus operandi, the change in the identity of a character from being good to bad, and back to being good again, or the nastiness of the violence made all the more potent with the mental brutality mixed with it. Compared to that, Irene was brutal, but so is most of the Scandi novels, even the new Robert Galbraith novel is brutal. Brutality didn’t work for me in this book. They were horrifying but it failed to create the level of horror which would make me sit on the edge of the seat.

The plot too, was nothing new. A serial killer taking on the main protagonist in a cat and mouse game, trying to show who is the boss. Been there done that. The use of classic Crime novel as a point of reference though new but is not that ground-breaking. Yes, it does offer a comprehensive course on Crime fiction of sorts, but we have had serial killers referencing ancient Spanish inquisition methods to torture the victims to killers leaving classic rock albums in their victims’ tortured bodies. So, this proved to be “not so exciting” to me. As it was the case with the “TWIST” in the last pages. Somehow the book was so long and a bit slow that by the time the twist came it failed to twist me in any way.

So, when they publishers decided to publish the second book first they knew they were publishing the better of the two books. And indeed it was a success, and for the sole reason that I enjoyed Alex, did I decide to stick with Irene up to the end. Had it been the other way round maybe Irene would have been shelved as UNFINISHED. But, the end result is that Pierre Lemaitre is one hell of a writer. Maybe this was a first-book-blues but he got class, and whoever had read Alex will surely agree that though slow, Irene wasn’t a pushover novel, and that maybe the third book in the trilogy will surpass the first two.