Believing that his ship was to be called to sail soon, Mario had implored Lisetta to come see him one last time, and she had run away then, which resulted in the two lovers presumably being killed when discovered by the jealous father of Lisetta. The young couple turn out to be Lisetta, a local girl with a sexually abusive father, and her lover Mario, a young Italian soldier stationed at a repair ship that had been docked for an extended period at the town of Vigata. Learning that the bodies were placed sometime around the allied invasion and devastating bombing of the island at the end of World War II, Montalbano interviews local residents from that time to try to piece together who the young couple were, why they were killed and why they were ritually buried.

Montalbano notices that the inside of the cave is not symmetrical and figures out there must be a secret room, where he discovers the bodies of two young lovers, carefully arranged in what appears to be some kind of ancient ritual guarded by a terracotta dog. When Tano ends up dying at the hands of mafia rivals during a police transfer, he passes on information to Montalbano that leads the inspector and his team to search for a secret cave used as a black market goods store during World War II and now used for smuggling arms for the mafia, in which the grocery store owner was complicit. At the same time there has also been a seemingly unrelated and mysterious theft of a grocery store delivery truck the truck is discovered the next morning, abandoned, with the stolen goods still within and intact.Īn old man, Misucara, who was witness to the robbery, then dies in a suspicious accident, but not before passing on an odd bit of information to the inspector: that the grocery store owner's car was parked nearby during the time of the robbery. The arrest causes Montalbano to have to appear at a press conference and be considered for promotion, both of which he does not appreciate. The story starts off with 'Tano Il Greco', a tired mafia boss, making a deal with Montalbano to stage his arrest in order for him to save face. An illustration of the legend of the Seven Sleepers

Inspector montalbano the terracotta dog