The Shape of Water:

The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes. Drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour.

But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture.

The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes, refreshingly unusual for Sicily. But Inspector Salvo Montalbano, as honest as he is streetwise and as scathing to fools and villains as he is compassionate to their victims, is not ready to close the case even though he's being pressured by Vigata's police chief, judge and bishop.

Picking his way through a labyrinth of high comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta fire power and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.

The Terracotta Dog:

opens with a mysterious tete-a-tete with a Mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, and some dying words that lead Inspector Montalbano to a secret grotto in a mountain cave where two young lovers dead fifty years and still embracing are watched over by a life-size terracotta dog.

Montalbano's passion to solve this old crime takes him, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island's past and into a family's dark heart amid the horrors of World War II.