On This Page
Description
"When Commissaire Adamsberg, the chief of police in Paris's 7th Arrondissement, is called to the scene of a ghastly and highly unusual murder, he thinks it can't have anything to do with the nine pairs of shoes and severed feet discovered outside of London's Highgate Cemetery just a few days earlier. With the help of the murdered man's gifted physician, Adamsberg delves into the victim's disturbed psyche and unexpectedly finds himself on a path that takes him deep into the haunted past of show more Eastern Europe, where a centuries-old horror has come to life and is claiming victims far and wide. As Adamsberg circles closer to the truth, it becomes clear that someone on the inside wants to shut down the investigation, no matter the cost"-- show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
Member Reviews
The inimitable Fred Vargas delves into the undergrowth of society once again, but this time goes very far underground, into the tombs of men. The novel becomes a beguiling dalliance in the world of vampiry and Old World taboos. The novel will definitely raise the hackles if you are reading this alone, at night. It is not, however, a vampire novel, à la Twilight cheesiness, but a grounded crime fiction with all the elements of a solid investigation into police corruption.
Adamsberg continues to surprise and delight readers with his quirky ways; Adrien Danglard is allowed to unfurl his emotional wings, just a bit, with hints of more to come. Poor Danglard, the stalwart backbone of the Adamsberg storyline seems on the edge of being show more rewarded for his dependable and unflagging conscientiousness, albeit somewhat in the abstract. (Even in fiction, it feels good when the good guy gets rewarded.)
Vargas's subtle humour is always a sneaky surprise, causing you to chuckle three pages after the fact, as she pulls in all the threads of her story.
The ultimate in comfort crime fiction for me -- a contradiction in terms if ever there was one! show less
Adamsberg continues to surprise and delight readers with his quirky ways; Adrien Danglard is allowed to unfurl his emotional wings, just a bit, with hints of more to come. Poor Danglard, the stalwart backbone of the Adamsberg storyline seems on the edge of being show more rewarded for his dependable and unflagging conscientiousness, albeit somewhat in the abstract. (Even in fiction, it feels good when the good guy gets rewarded.)
Vargas's subtle humour is always a sneaky surprise, causing you to chuckle three pages after the fact, as she pulls in all the threads of her story.
The ultimate in comfort crime fiction for me -- a contradiction in terms if ever there was one! show less
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 show more 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. show less
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 show more 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. show less
This book was so imaginative! I really enjoyed it. By the time the author introduced an element* that usually makes me roll my eyes in disgust, I was already laughing about the hot mess of officers in Adamsberg's police station and smiling at the cats and kittens also populating his world. It is easy enough to suspend disbelief with writing this entertaining.
Favorite lines:
"'Every man has his price, his demons, everyone has a grenade under the bed. It makes a great chain of people around the globe who've got each other by the balls.'"
"It wasn't going to be easy to get a woman living alone to open the door just by saying 'police,' which wouldn't convince anyone. Either you didn't believe it was the police, or you did, which was even show more worse."
*Vampires show less
Favorite lines:
"'Every man has his price, his demons, everyone has a grenade under the bed. It makes a great chain of people around the globe who've got each other by the balls.'"
"It wasn't going to be easy to get a woman living alone to open the door just by saying 'police,' which wouldn't convince anyone. Either you didn't believe it was the police, or you did, which was even show more worse."
*Vampires show less
This is the first Fred Vargas I've tried, and I liked it: fiction is full of eccentric detectives, but Adamsberg manages to have some entertainingly different eccentricities from the rest, and the plot wasn't too predictable. I loved the old-fashioned way the final identification of the murderer was based on a logical (but well-hidden) Clue that we could have worked out for ourselves if we'd noticed it in time. Not something you often see these days.
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 show more 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. show less
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 show more 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. show less
I've always had a soft spot for Commissaire Adamsberg, and for Fred Vargas. Not this time. The book begins in London with a pile of shoes with severed feet inside, returns to France and a singularly gruesome murder, and ends up in Serbia with a clutch of vampires. Everything turns out to be connected, of course. It's all very clever and well thought-out, but as coincidence piled on coincidence, as ever more improbable people in the dramatis personae proved to be linked, I lost patience. I read to the end, but with diminishing enthusiasm. It was obvious that all the horror would unpick, that the right people would get their just deserts, and that the other right people would live happily ever after. And so it turned out.
This is number 6 in the Parisian Commissaire/Chief Inspector Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg police procedural mysteries, but it's actually the first I've read.
While the Commissaire is attending a meeting in London, he and an English policeman discover eight and a half pairs of shoes with severed feet in them. Bizarrely, they are lined up as if wanting to enter the ancient and eerie, much-storied Highgate Cemetery.
After returning to Paris, the Commissaire is called to the site of an incredibly violent murder. The victim was not only dismembered but entirely severed into very small pieces.
The two macabre events converge and part of the answer seems to lie in Serbia at the grave of a ‘centuries old horror’ (quote from back cover) of a still show more feared vampire.
Lots of nicely written twists and turns kept me guessing; the bit of supernatural horror was just enough to make it interesting, but not necessarily push it into another genre of mystery. It’s a series that I will continue. show less
While the Commissaire is attending a meeting in London, he and an English policeman discover eight and a half pairs of shoes with severed feet in them. Bizarrely, they are lined up as if wanting to enter the ancient and eerie, much-storied Highgate Cemetery.
After returning to Paris, the Commissaire is called to the site of an incredibly violent murder. The victim was not only dismembered but entirely severed into very small pieces.
The two macabre events converge and part of the answer seems to lie in Serbia at the grave of a ‘centuries old horror’ (quote from back cover) of a still show more feared vampire.
Lots of nicely written twists and turns kept me guessing; the bit of supernatural horror was just enough to make it interesting, but not necessarily push it into another genre of mystery. It’s a series that I will continue. show less
Members
- Recently Added By
Published Reviews
ThingScore 75
A nice Gallic counterpart to Christopher Fowler's very English "Peculiar Crimes Unit" series, which also hints at the supernatural and stars eccentric sleuths. Readers should suspend their disbelief at Vargas's dizzying array of plot twists and coincidences and just enjoy the roller-coaster ride. Great fun!
added by Christa_Josh
Lists
Recommend the 20 best books you've read in the last five years
2,168 works; 606 members
Books Read in 2016
4,666 works; 199 members
Books Read in 2018
4,360 works; 110 members
Author Information
68+ Works 15,344 Members
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Series
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- An Uncertain Place
- Original title
- Un lieu incertain
- Original publication date
- 2008 (original French) (original French); 2011 (English translation) (English translation)
- People/Characters
- Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg (Commissaire); Adrien Danglard
- Important places
- Paris, France; Highgate Cemetery, London, England, UK; Serbia
- Related movies
- Un lieu incertain (2010 | IMDb | TV)
- First words
- Le commissaire Adamsberg savait repasser les chemises, sa mère lui avait appris à aplatir l'empiècement d'épaule et à lisser le tissu autour des boutons.
- Quotations*
- Gli agenti alzarono la testa tutti insieme per annusare. Strano, pensò Adamsberg, che l'essere umano sollevi istintivamernte il naso di dieci centimetri quando si tratta di percepire un odore. Come se dieci centimetri cambia... (show all)ssero qualcosa. Spinti da quel riflesso automatico conservato dalla notte dei tempi, gli agenti sembravano proprio un branco di gerbilli che cercano di captare nel vento l'odore del nemico.
«Ascolta, piccolo, è l'ora del cambio. Ascolta il rumore degli animali che si addormentano e di quelli che si svegliano. Senti il fruscio delle corolle che si chiudono». - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Où repousseront-elles, Peter?
- Publisher's editor*
- Viviane Hamy
- Original language
- Français; Französisch
- Disambiguation notice
- Original French title = Un lieu incertain
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 1,097
- Popularity
- 23,050
- Reviews
- 55
- Rating
- (3.77)
- Languages
- 15 — Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese (Portugal)
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 57
- ASINs
- 16