Fred Vargas Boeken

The exhilarating new Inspector Adamsberg novel from France’s multi-million-copy bestselling crime fiction star ‘Adamsberg is one of my favourite detectives... I so enjoyed This Poison Will Remain’ ANN CLEEVES ‘Absorbing… Full of twists and spiced with Vargas’s characteristic wit and style’ PETER ROBINSON ‘Vargas’s books are…cunning, corkscrew murder mysteries’ A.J. FINN After three elderly men are bitten by spiders, everyone assumes that their deaths are tragic accidents. But at police headquarters in Paris, Inspector Adamsberg begins to suspect that the case is far more complex than first appears. It isn’t long before Adamsberg is investigating a series of rumours and allegations that take him to the south of France. Decades ago, at La Miséricorde orphanage, shocking events took place involving the same species of spider: the recluse. For Adamsberg, these haunting crimes hold the key to proving that the three men were targeted by an ingenious serial killer. His team, however, is not convinced. He must put his reputation on the line to trace the murderer before the death toll rises…

French crime queen's new mystery - her best yet. Sunday Times

In this mystery, Commissaire Adamsberg is pitted against nemeses past and present: Ariane Lagarde, France's foremost pathologist and Adamsberg's enemy since they argued over a case twenty-three years earlier, and Louis Veyrenc, a new recruit with a grudge, who has been assigned the job of protecting the Commissaire's ex-girlfriend.

Shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger HOW DO YOU SOLVE A MURDER WITHOUT A BODY? Keeping watch under the windows of the Paris flat belonging to a politician's nephew, ex-special investigator Louis Kehlweiler catches sight of something odd on the pavement. A tiny piece of bone. Human bone, in fact. When Kehlweiler takes his find to the nearest police station, he faces ridicule. Obsessed by the fragment, he follows the trail to the tiny Breton fishing village of Port-Nicolas – in search of a dog. But when he recruits ‘evangelists’ Marc and Mathias to help, they find themselves facing even bigger game. A THREE EVANGELISTS NOVEL

The opera singer Sophia Siméonidis wakes up one morning to discover that a tree has appeared overnight in the garden of her Paris house. Intrigued and unnerved, she turns to her neighbours: Vandoosler, an ex-cop, and three impecunious historians, Mathias, Marc and Lucien - the three evangelists. They agree to dig around the tree and see if something has been buried there. They find nothing but soil.A few weeks later, Sophia disappears and her body is found burned to ashes in a car. Who killed the opera singer? Her husband, her ex-lover, her best friend, her niece? They all seem to have a motive.Vandoosler and the three evangelists set out to find the truth.

Adamsberg travels to London, where a routine conference draws him into a disturbing investigation. Commissaire Adamsberg leaves Paris for a three-day conference in London. With him are a young sergeant, Estalère, and Commandant Danglard, who is terrified at the idea of travelling beneath the Channel. It is the break they all need, until a macabre and brutal case comes to the attention of their colleague Radstock from New Scotland Yard. Just outside the baroque and romantic old Highgate cemetery a pile of shoes is found. Not so strange in itself, but the shoes contain severed feet. As Scotland Yard's investigation begins, Adamsberg and his colleagues return home and are confronted with a massacre in a suburban home. Adamsberg and Danglard are drawn in to a trail of vampires and vampire-hunters that leads them all the way to Serbia, a place where the old certainties no longer apply.

Each day in honour of a Parisian tradition, a town crier calls out the local news to all who will listen. Over the course of a few days a number of disturbing messages are slipped into his box, messages of portentous and malicious intent referring to the Black Death. Strange marks have also appeared on the doors of several buildings: symbols once used to ward off the plague. Detective Commissaire Adamsberg begins to sense a connection, even a grotesque menace. Then charred and flea-bitten corpses are found. The press seizes on their plague-like symptoms, and the panic sets in.

Years before, Adamsberg's own brother had been the principal suspect in a similar case and avoided prison only thanks to Adamsberg's help. In order to prove his innocence, Adamsberg must go on the run from the Canadian police and find Judge Fulgence.

On the outskirts of Paris, two men have been found with their throats cut. It is assumed that this is a drug-related incident of the kind so often uncovered in that area of town. But Adamsberg is convinced that there is more to it. Anxious to keep control of the case, he must call in a favour from the pathologist Ariane Lagarde, someone he had come up against twenty-three years previously.

‘People will die,’ says the panic-stricken woman outside police headquarters. She refuses to speak to anyone besides Commissaire Adamsberg. Her daughter has seen a vision: ghostly horsemen who target the most nefarious characters in Normandy. Since the middle ages there have been stories of murderers, rapists, those with serious crimes on their conscience, meeting a grisly end following a visitation by the riders. Soon after the young woman’s vision a notoriously vicious and cruel man disappears. Although the case is far outside his jurisdiction, Adamsberg agrees to investigate the strange happenings in a village terrorised by wild rumours and ancient feuds.