Of detectives and maternal love

Clare Azzopardi: Castillo Merlin Publishers, 2018
Clare Azzopardi has already established herself as an author of fiction with her short stories  (her Kulħadd ħalla isem warajh volume of stories was particularly outstanding and has also been published in Hungarian) and now her readers are being offered her first adult novel, Castillo.

Like many other novelists all over the globe, she has chosen a murder as the core of her plot.  The person killed is a novelist, K. or Cathy Penza, whose crime novels with an Inspector Castillo as the protagonist came out in the 1970s and early 80s and were cut short when Penza was killed by a car bomb (intended for her?) in December 1986. 
When this happened, her twin sister Emma Barbara unexpectedly abandoned her home, her husband and her young daughter Amanda, and went to live on her own.
The novel opens with a  grown-up Amanda, who is seeking out the mother who abandoned her 25 years ago. Emma Barbara, now middle-aged and somewhat slovenly in her dress and in the general neglect of the house, gives Amanda the shocking news that she herself has committed a murder – that of a man called Tommy, a neighbour in Ħal- Għargħur where she lives.
Tommy...