'' The Potter's Field'' (orig. Italian ''Il campo del vasaio'') is a 2008 novel by Andrea Camilleri, translated into English in 2011 by

Stephen Sartarelli Stephen Sartarelli (born 1954 in Youngstown, Ohio) is an American poet and translator. Life Sartarelli graduated from Antioch College and New York University. Specializing in translations from French and Italian into English, he has translated the ...

. It is the thirteenth novel in the internationally popular Inspector Montalbano series.

Summary

After a disturbing dream, where his Chief Bonetti-Alderighi comes crying at Montalbano's door begging to be hidden and protected from

the Mafia "Mafia", as an informal or general term, is often used to describe criminal organizations that bear a strong similarity to the original Mafia in Sicily, to the Italian-American Mafia, or to other organized crime groups from Italy. The central ...

, which has taken political power and Mafioso Totò Riina has become

prime minister A prime minister or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. A prime minister is not the head of state, but r ...

,Clear allusion to recent Italian politics. Cf. Camilleri, ''op. cit., s.v.'' the Inspector is woken up by a window shutter banging against the wall and soon later by another banging, at the door, by Catarella who, as usual, announces the finding of a corpse. Under a steady downpour and between various expletives, the Inspector and his men, including a grumpy Mimì Augello, Montalbano's deputy, succeed in retrieving the dead body, cut into pieces inside a bag and buried in a field of clay used by potters. Complicating the investigation is the strange behaviour of Augello, who has become morose and quarrelsome, thus making hell for everyone at the police station. Trying to understand what is happening to his deputy, Montalbano discovers that Mimì is betraying his wife with another woman and telling lies about him being engaged in police activities that keep him busy all night. So the Inspector enlists the help of his Swedish friend Ingrid, whom he asks to tail Mimì and find out what he's doing and who the other woman is. Meanwhile the investigation into the cut-up body, impossible to identify, becomes even more entangled due to a complaint by the beautiful South American Dolores whose husband, a ship officer, has disappeared. A not unimportant fact is that the officer was a distant relation of

Mafia boss A crime boss, also known as a crime lord, mafia don, mob boss, kingpin, or godfather is the leader of a criminal organization. Description A crime boss has absolute or nearly absolute control over the other members of the organization and is ...

Balduccio Sinagra. What with the search for the missing husband, Augello's strange behaviour, and old mafiosi rituals which recall biblical passages (the

Gospel Gospel originally meant the Christianity, Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the second century Anno domino, AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message w ...

's ''"the potter’s field, to bury strangers in"'', ), Montalbano's faith in his closest friends begins to falter.

Notes

2008 Italian novels Inspector Montalbano novels Italian crime novels Italian mystery novels Novels set in Sicily {{2000s-crime-novel-stub