The Safety Net by Andrea Camilleri, 2020

One of Montalbano’s acquaintances draws his attention to a set of home movies, each showing the same view of a wall. Notes on each box indicate they were shot at the same time on the same day from 1958 to 1963. This piques Montalbano’s interest, and he promises to look into it. While that’s going on, a more serious situation develops at a local middle school when a pair of gunmen in Anonymous masks terrorize a classroom. There’s also some business about a Swedish-Italian film crew making a movie about love-struck kids in 1950s Vigàta. This business provides a couple of minor plot points, but seems to be in the story mostly to give Montalbano something new to complain about.

Montalbano’s informal investigation recalls his work in The Terracotta Dog: both require unraveling long-ago events, and both involve him staring at walls. The school case is Augello’s because Montalbano is up north with his girlfriend when it happens. As you might expect, Montalbano comes back and develops the intuition that breaks the case. The detection is typical Camilleri — intuition, dreams, timely revelation, folk psychologizing — enlivened with an extra dash of Catarella because computers figure in the school case. Camilleri apparently wants to complain too, because he has Montalbano go on about these kids today and their damn computers and cell phones. Montalbano also speculates philosophically about the difficulty of providing protection come what may, establishing a thread, however thin, among the three situations in the story.

Both cases have muted endings. Montalbano decides it’s best to bury the results of his informal investigation into the wall films, and farms out the resolution of the school case to someone outside the police department. Although both resolutions make sense, the school case isn’t Montalbano’s to dispose of (technically I suppose it is because Montalbano is Augello’s boss). This goes undiscussed, which is a bit of a surprise because part of the story involves, as usual, friction between Montalbano and Augello.