to- ( )

Cécile has been coming to see Maigret for some time to complain about mysterious nocturnal goings-on in the apartment she shares with her elderly aunt, to the extent that she's become a standing joke with Maigret's subordinates, but so far the police haven't found any sign of wrong-doing. But then the aunt is found murdered and Cécile goes missing, only to turn up dead in a broom cupboard in the Palace of Justice. Embarrassing for the police, to say the least, but it gives Maigret an excuse to shift his attention from a tedious surveillance operation elsewhere and dig into the backgrounds of the miserly aunt and her downstairs neighbour, a shady debarred lawyer from Fontenay-le-Comte.

A fairly routine sort of Maigret, but with enough nice touches to keep the reader's attention. ( )

Can't quite put my finger on why I didn't love this one as much as others. Still very good though. Took me forever to finish, I guess I thought the premise of this one was a little much, though a couple of the characters are classics. ( )

I found a podcast of radio plays taken from the Maigret books for free on iTunes, and have therefore taken to reading the books themselves. After listening to all those radio plays this is very much what I expected. There were as many ellipses as straight-up periods at the ends of sentences, and Maigret mopes around a lot of the time with his hands in his pockets, arguing with suspects like a cranky old grandpa. There is a strong sense of established character here: you are expected to pick this book up knowing that Maigret is who he is, and you read this because you expect him to behave in a very certain way. Which he does.

Not a particularly fascinating plotline in this one. The ending, however, both surprised me and seemed realistic. I suppose I will have to go read another Maigret book to see how I really feel about the series. The idea that these are 'psychological mysteries' is an apt one. It was also a very fast read, so I didn't feel that I had wasted any time on it. All in all, I'm pretty ambivalent, though on the kindly side of ambivalence. It was fine to spend a little time on. ( )

Sad, but also the specter of vice!