Changes

It takes just one policeman's iota of doubt, that an elderly woman found dead in her bath with her wrists slit was not actual suicide but murder instead, for Commissaire Adamsberg to become involved. The woman, known to be dying, had struggled to get a letter posted in the days before her death – and when the recipient is found out it immediately leads to another murder disguised as suicide, and more deaths are to come. All indications (or at least those that can be understood) point to a hushed-up murder and rape on a remote and isolated Icelandic island ten years previously, but Adamsberg and his team will soon be working on the thinking that the whole truth is much more peculiar, and harder to solve, than that…

There were, however, a few things stopping me from doing that. Past experience is one – this author certainly can put a great thriller together, and she has been incredibly influential, certainly in French crime circles if nowhere else; and the other is her style. She is not really a skippable author, as her writing can be quite dense – a friendly, accessible dense, but dense all the same. Certainly , Adamsberg is a rich character, what with his airy-fairy ways of thinking outside the box, shooting the breeze at night with his neighbour or his son to try and work mentally on the case, wearing two stopped watches at one and the same time, and so on. Alongside him are a host of other good characters, from the heavily cultured brainbox, to the woman mountain, to the narcoleptic one often curled up asleep like the dormouse in ''Alice''. These books feature so much detail at times, you can never work out in advance which will be used for a call-back later on, and which is merely incidental, character-building, to be mentioned once and forgotten.