A chance encounter with a strange young woman leads Inspector Montalbano to Vigata harbour - and into a puzzling new mystery. The crew of a mysterious yacht - the Vanna - due to dock in the area have discovered a corpse floating in the water, the dead man's face badly disfigured.

Inspector Montalbano rises one morning to find the carcass of a horse on the beach in front of his seaside home. But no sooner do his men arrive, than the body has mysteriously vanished, leaving behind only a trail in the sand.

Inspector Montalbano is awake at dawn, sitting on his porch, when his attention is caught by a seagull which falls from the sky, performing a strange dance, before lying down to die. Montalbano is perplexed by what he has witnessed and the scene hangs over him like an omen. About to depart for a holiday with his girlfriend Livia, Montalbano makes a quick trip to the police station to tie up loose ends. But when his dear colleague Fazio is discovered...

When a gentleman arrives at Montalbano's station to report an armed robbery on his wife that ended with a kiss, the inspector's suspicions are aroused. As he delves deeper into the case, Montalbano finds that none of the witnesses' stories are adding up, and he can't help but feel that perhaps they're not meant to. When a body turns up showing all the signs of a mafia hit, the inspector knows he must excavate the truth from what he is being led to...

It occurred to him that he might not have had anything to do with Strangio's death. It was a voice in the night, an anonymous voice, that had told him this. A voice in the night that could easily have been the voice of his conscience. Feeling his age, as his birthday rolls round once again, Inspector Montalbano decides to cheer himself up by dealing with a young driver's road rage in his own unique way. But his joy is short-lived, as at police headquarters...

The Overnight Kidnapper is the twenty-third Inspector Montalbano mystery, from the international bestselling author Andrea Camilleri. After a hectic morning involving two rather irritating cases of mistaken identity, Inspector Montalbano finally arrives in his office ready find out what's troubling Vigt̉a this week. What he discovers is unnerving. A woman on her way home from work has been held up at gunpoint, chloroformed and kidnapped, but then...