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Just discovered the Montalbano series by Andrea Camilleri.
Set in and around the imaginary Sicilian town of Vigata (based on the author's home town of Porto Empodocle), it features Commissario Salvo Montalbano, the chief of the town's detective squad. The translator does an excellent job, given the tricky problem of the languages spoken in Sicily. The stories are told in Italian, and most of the characters speak it, but there's a fair bit of real Sicilian, too, not to mention the mangled version of Italian spoken by some Sicilian speakers who fondly imagine they're speaking Italian.
They're fairly short-- around 50,000 words each-- but taken together the 20 or so novels they cover around 20 years of Inspector Montalbano's career, as he ages in 'real time.' I've read about 10 so far. A few of the novels, and several collections of Montalbano short stories, are not yet available in English.
There's damned good TV series made from them, too, shot on location in Sicily. (Subtitled in English for non-Sicilians) The beachfront house where Montalbano lives, as used in the TV series, is in real life a bed and breakfast.
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