Imprint: Vintage
Published: 07/10/2004
ISBN: 9780099453642
Length: 400 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 25mm x 129mm
Weight: 277g
RRP: £9.99
Three times a day in a Parisian square, a curious modern-day crier announces the news items that are left in his box. Over the course of a few days he receives a number of disturbing and portentous messages of malicious intent, all of them 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 charged and flea-bitten corpses are found. The press seizes on their plague-like symptoms, and the panic sets in.
Imprint: Vintage
Published: 07/10/2004
ISBN: 9780099453642
Length: 400 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 25mm x 129mm
Weight: 277g
RRP: £9.99
One of the most fetchingly weird detectives...Adamsberg is a bit like Morse, but much more French. An unusual, eccentric thriller
Fred Vargas has everything: complex and surprising plots, good pace, various and eccentric characters, a sense of place and history, individualized dialogue, wit and style
Moody, tense and grotesque, Vargas's prize-winning novel is a fascinating exploration of Paris's dark side
No procedural, this, as we follow the twists and turns of Adamsberg's intuition - but it is thoroughly high-class entertainment, notably as Vargas is not afraid to test herself with the narrative
On the basis of this elegantly twisted crime novel, Vargas is clearly an author who will rank alongside Henning Mankell. The detective, Commissaire Adamsberg, is the antithesis of Sherlock Homes: intuitive, preternaturally alert to hunches, and shabbier than Colombo. The plot kinks and switches in an utterly compelling manner. Creepy, sophisticated and wonderfully off-beat