Maybe it's the slow and relentless passing of the years, or the long forced immobility due to the gunshot wound he received in his previous investigation, or maybe even the feeling that his personal life has reached a stalemate that has all the signs of being final: the fact is that Montalbano, hero of "La pazienza del ragno", the eighth novel in the saga dedicated to the most famous cop in Italian literature, is a tired and disheartened man, a detective who does not understand or fully approve of all the reasons behind his job. At the end of the previous book, "Il giro di boa", we had left him in a hospital bed, injured on the shoulder at the end of a case dealing with an illegal trade in children: now we find him, a few weeks later, at home, at grips with a difficult convalescence made even more arduous by the presence of Livia, his long-term girlfriend who has come down from Genoa to look after him with loving care. But our hero's humour is "black", just as in his worst moments: he is worn down by the memories of the endless days spent in hospital, amidst operating theatres and flapping white coats, tormented by persistent insomnia. Worse still, he is torn by a bottomless melancholy, perhaps generated by "that Something that had marked him while the bullet tore open his flesh": a kind of basso continuo, an incurable feeling of uselessness that keeps going through his mind. Almost to take his mind off things, or perhaps as a favour to a colleague who has been assigned the case, he decides to follow up the mysterious kidnapping of a girl who is attending the first year at university: the mystery is that - unlike so many ordinary kidnappings, accompanied by a ransom request - this time the girl's family, though once fairly well off, is now reduced almost to poverty (as everyone in Vigàta knows). So it soon appears clear that the person the kidnappers have in sight is the girl's uncle on her mother's side, a self-confident entrepreneur who has made a fortune laughing at the laws or bending them to suit his own purposes, and who is soon to be a candidate in the ranks of the government party Progresso Italia. The solution of the problem is not as complex as it might appear, and Montalbano finds it by means of reasoning and intuition, as usual, plus the help of a Simenon novel that he found behind the bedside table and of a spider's web on a bush; but the detective chooses not to make the solution known to the public, applying his "personal criteria of judgement of what is right and what is wrong". And so ends this unusual "thriller", without corpses, with a Montalbano who is moved with a frequency that is rather suspicious and even shows signs of growing old ("might it not be a sign of encroaching senility?"). The last page mentions a "violent rainstorm", such as the ones that usually mark the end of winter and open the way to spring: perhaps a harbinger of new hope.