The setting is once again Sicily, and the subject is mafia murder.
A Carabinieri lieutenant from Parma, stationed on the island, finds himself investigating the murder of a small building contractor, soon followed by the killings of a peasant—a pruner by trade—who had recognized the assassin, and of a police informant who had named the instigators.
Dismissing the crime-of-passion angle (the pruner’s wife had a lover), the lieutenant skillfully manages to extract a confession from the hitman and the man who commissioned him, tracing the trail back to a powerful mafia figure and risking the exposure of connivance with the political sphere.
A member of parliament and a government minister may be implicated, both intervening repeatedly to halt the investigation.
In the end, it is the mafia that will provide the three suspects with «illustrious alibis».
While on leave in Parma, the lieutenant learns that the killer and the instigators have been acquitted, and that the crime-of-passion lead has been reopened.
After dinner with friends, the lieutenant «felt like a convalescent: intensely sensitive, tender, hungry».
«To hell with Sicily, to hell with everything»....He walked back home around midnight, crossing the entire city on foot....but before reaching home he knew, with lucid certainty, that he loved Sicily and that he would return.
«I’ll break my head against it,» he said aloud.
With subtle irony, the author constructs a plot suspended between the detective story—fraught with suspense at times—and the political novel, focusing on the ambiguity of power (magnificent, in this respect, are the exchanges between the member of parliament and other institutional figures whom the reader is deliberately not allowed to identify) and the perhaps natural collusion among the various tiers into which power itself is structured.
Precisely because power is the fundamental theme, one of the book’s most famous scenes appears genuinely out of place: the passage in which the mafia boss expounds his vision of society to the lieutenant (men, half-men, pigmies, arse-takers, and quaquaraquà), introducing folkloric elements and a trite sociology that diminish the intellectual weight of a work that is not merely about Sicily and the mafia, but seizes upon the mafia crime as an opportunity to reflect on power as an obscure, invulnerable force.
It is for this reason that the novel achieves universality, transcending its historical and social context.
The style is brisk and brilliant, driven by a narrative momentum that suffers rare lapses in tension (most notably in the aforementioned soliloquies of the mafia boss).
The syntactic structure and language are lean yet incisive, entrusting their expressive force to narrative cadence, the careful deployment of adjectives, and the seamless transition between clauses.
Sciascia remains an essential reference point for the Italian language.

The Day of the Owl