Un lieu incertain (original 2008; edition 2008)

Questa volta ci sono zii mangiati da orsi e zii senza più le scarpe e i vampiri, e fin qui sarebbero le solite assurdità da spalatori di nuvole, però questo romanzo arranca rispetto ai precedenti.
Il bello dei romanzi della Vargas sono i personaggi e quel senso di indeterminatezza nell'indagine: questa volta però l'azione risulta più frenetica con personaggi che appaiono di sfuggita a cui poi non si presta più attenzione (e di Camille e Tom manco l'ombra). ( )

Durante una visita a Londres, Adamsberg descubre, ante las puertas del cementerio de Highgate, varios pares de zapatos (con los pies dentro) que han sido abandonados allí, como una señal. Se ve envuelto en una extraña investigación que lo llevara a Serbia. ( )

J'ai une très haute opinion de Vargas, mais, j'avoue, ce roman m'a déçue : trop compliqué avec des coïncidences peu crédibles, il n'a pas le charme des autres; même le thème mythologique (cette fois-ci les vampires) ne m'a pas branchée, remâché sans les éléments piquants et obscurs que l'on retrouve d'habitude chez Vargas. Enfin, les interventions ex-machina frisaient le ridicule... Il y avait des points sympas, notamment le voyage en Serbie, des personnages attirants tel le docteur Josselin et la corruption des hautes sphères.
En conclusion, Vargas m'a habituée à mieux. ( )

Fred Vargas is just excellent! I always finish her books wishing that I didn't have to leave Paris and Commissaire Adamsberg so soon. ( )

17 shoes with cut off decomposed feet in them are found at the entrance to the Highgate Cemetery in London, a man is chopped up into little pieces and flung all over the room, a Serbian village lives in fear of a master vampire.... and someone is out to finger Inspector Adamsberg for a crime.

The dead man was not a random victim but finding the reasons why anyone would want to brutally murder him pits Adamsberg up against a very clever and determined killer, one with a very strong opinion of families and family lines. Adamsberg's challenges this time include a member of his team who behaves increasingly oddly, a pregnant cat, a vault of vampires, an old enemy and a shocking surprise.

This series just keeps getting better and better, and Vargas's skill in keeping the identity of the murderer until the very end while keeping the tension taut borders on sheer genius. ( )

As Chief of the Serious Crimes Squad in Paris, Commissaire Adamsberg is obliged to attend the 3 day conference in London about controlling migratory flows in Europe. As he doesn't speak English, he is rather hoping to be able to tune out of most of the discussion. He knows his deputy Commandant Danglard, who has an excellent grasp of English, will tell him the most important bits anyway.

Danglard makes several friends at the conference and through one of them, DCI Radstock of New Scotland Yard, he and Adamsberg are treated to the amazing sight of a collection of pairs of shoes (containing feet) at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery. Some of the shoes are ancient, while others more modern, and to his dismay Danglard thinks he recognises one of the pairs. It certainly seems as if most of the shoes may be of European origin.

When Adamsberg and his team return to Paris they are confronted with the very grisly case in which a body has been

"chopped up, pulverised, scattered. Wherever you look, you see parts of it, and when you see it all, you can't see any of it. There's nothing but the body, but the body isn't there.

...This old man wasn't just killed, he was reduced to nothingness. He didn't have his life taken, he was literally demolished, wiped out."

Adamsberg's team's hunt for the killer sends them looking for relatives of the victim, to trying to understand why the victim did not leave his estate to his own son but to his part-time gardener, and then by chance, to the discovery that a distant relative has been killed in a similar fashion. Adamsberg himself eventually ends up in Serbia, in a village, where nearly 3 centuries before, at least two families were thought to be vampires. And there too he unearths the connection with Highgate Cemetery.

But there is something else going on too. Someone in high places is calling in favours, and a member of his own team is subverted in an attempt to have Adamsberg discredited and dismissed, and his investigation cancelled. So Adamsberg know he is getting too close to the truth. But which truth and just who is it that is pulling the strings?

One of the tricks in a Vargas novel is to work out what is the really important information and to retain that so that eventually your brain will make the connections. I wondered several times where AN UNCERTAIN PLACE was headed, and whether either I or Vargas had "lost the plot".
As Norman says on Crime Scraps

this novel is designed to be read slowly because you won't want it to end; the literary equivalent of slow cooking, or sipping a fine whisky or wine. A tasty French bouillabaisse of a novel to be enjoyed and savoured by gourmets of crime fiction.

Not everybody will enjoy AN UNCERTAIN PLACE. I did find myself wondering what had been the trigger for Vargas in writing this novel.
For some Adamsberg and his team will be just too peculiar, the idea that events in London, Paris and Serbia could be connected will be just too much of a stretch, and the murders themselves will be just too grisly.

But for me, in the end, Vargas pulled it off. It is a novel that just can't be finished and put aside. The reader needs to reflect to see how finely Vargas connected the threads. ( )

In 2008 the fourth of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books was published, completing the vampire renaissance, and ensuring that you couldn’t stroll through a bookshop without encountering a fanged predator lurking amongst the shelves. Not even the crime section was safe, for that was the year when Fred Vargas’ An uncertain place came out in France and brought us the prospect of commissaire Adamsberg as a latter-day Van Helsing, caught in the middle of a centuries-old feud between the bloodsuckers and those who would destroy them.
One singular difference between Meyer and Vargas is that Meyer’s vampires are cobbled together from twentieth century vampire lore, as purveyed on the large and small screens, whereas Vargas’ are rooted in the historical past – the turbulent Balkans of the eighteenth century and the solemn Victorian splendour of Highgate cemetery. This, of course, is one of Vargas’ notorious strengths – to take an episode from another era (the Black Death in Have mercy on us all) or a figure of myth (werewolves in Seeking whom he may devour) and weave it into a contemporary murder mystery, forcing together the rational present and the superstitious past, scientific method and legendary practices. Little wonder that the resulting cases can only be handled successfully by a holy fool such as Adamsberg, a blissful surfer on the seas of instinct and intuition, with a little help from his sceptical sidekick inspector Danglard, who needs a raft of well-ordered facts to stay afloat.
Adamsberg’s investigative style, and by extension Vargas’ plotting, is guaranteed to irritate traditionalist armchair detectives who pride themselves on their ability to spot the culprit before their fictional alter ego does so (and in saying this I must admit I am to a certain extent just such a traditionalist). In a Vargas book there is no hierarchy of significance – the slightest detail often outweighs chapters’ worth of procedural toil. In the end, there’s no point trying to outguess the author. What we are called upon to do is to mimic Adamsberg’s approach and just go with the flow, trusting to the author to carry us through safely – and delighted – to the conclusion.
An uncertain place is true to the tradition of quirkiness that has marked all the Adamsberg books. The crimes are suitably weird and macabre – a collection of severed feet left outside Highgate cemetery still snug in their shoes and a murder victim cut up into 460 separate pieces, 300 of which have been pounded to a pulp, in a suburban bungalow outside Paris. The investigation is appropriately unpredictable – Adamsberg helps the prime suspect escape justice before taking off to a village in Serbia where he encounters not only his current would-be nemesis but an old one from a previous book. And the incidental detail is as rich as ever (the correct name for someone who eats wardrobes, why you should bury a vampire face down, why you should carefully dispose of your pencil shavings, ...).
However, there is a difference between An uncertain place and its predecessors. Adamsberg seems lonelier, more isolated, and as a result we miss the constant interaction with the rest of his team that was such a source of strength in previous books such as Wash this blood clean from my hand. Indeed, this book suggests that had Vargas decided at the outset to cast Adamsberg as a one-man-band, she would have produced a series of quirky books (possibly not too far removed from Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective), but not the compelling saga she came up with. Adamsberg needs Danglard as Holmes needs Watson. No man is an island, not even the loopiest individual. ( )

Comme d'habitude, c'est un bon polr, captivant et plein de surprises.
A LIRE!!!