The Shape of Water

The Shape of Water is a crime novel by the Italian writer Andrea Camilleri, published in Italian in 1994 under the title La forma dell'acqua and translated into English by Stephen Sartarelli in 2002. It is the first novel in Camilleri's long-running series following Salvo Montalbano, the chief of police in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigata, introducing the character and setting that would carry the series through dozens of further novels and a popular Italian television adaptation. The novel opens with the death of a prominent local engineer found in a car in a disreputable part of town, and Camilleri uses the resulting investigation to build a close, often wry portrait of Sicilian local politics, corruption and custom alongside the murder plot itself, establishing the tone that made the Montalbano series one of the best-known works of contemporary Italian crime fiction internationally.