Thursday 5 March 2020

This Poison Will Remain by Fred Vargas

Vargas is one of the most original authors in the crime fiction genre. Her award-winning Commissaire Adamsberg series is entertaining for a bunch of reasons. Paris and rural France settings: check. Creative and surprising storylines: check. Animated scenes set in cafes and restaurants reminiscent of Simenon’s Maigret novels: check. A police department peopled with eccentric detectives: check.

It is this last point that keeps me coming back to the series more than any other. As if Adamsberg isn’t oddball enough – he’s scruffy, secretive and sentimental, with a weird intuition that can sniff out guilt at a hundred paces. But his team in the Serious Crimes squad are even odder.

Voisenet would rather be an ichthyologist and has the head of a moray eel under his desk to study later. Mercedet suffers from narcolepsy, taking naps during the day in the cushiony corner of an unused office. Violet Retancourt is of Amazonian proportions, and ‘worth ten men’, but is the carer of Snowball, the office cat who sleeps on the disused photocopier always left on to keep it warm. To name but three.

In This Poison Will Remain, Adamsberg returns from leave to a murder case that needs careful handling. An elderly woman alerts him to the mysterious deaths of three old men in Nimes - each bitten by a recluse spider. Not normally fatal, these bites have turned to septicaemia and the victims’ age and tardiness in seeking medical treatment is thought to have contributed to their deaths.

The fact that two of the men were part of a gang in an orphanage and tormented other boys has Adamsberg sensing foul play. But getting his team on board, a team whose confidence in his leadership has been seriously undermined, has the Commissaire acting even more secretively than ever.

The novel has plenty of twists to keep you turning the pages, with a few key themes around child abuse and the effects of isolation, plus some interesting facts around religious recluses from medieval times. All the same, it’s a cracking good read that will make you laugh and yearn for another in the series. Best read in order, the novels first introduced us to Adamsberg in The Chalk Circle Man. Recommended.

Posted by JAM

Catalogue link: This Poison Will Remain

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