Seeking Whom He May Devour

4.5 stars

Another terrific novel by Fred Vargas. (And the hits, they just keep on comin'...)

Can you imagine being so disordered in mind that you would think this was only worth a 3-star rating? I almost made that mistake.

I was certainly enjoying the book well enough, but occasionally would slip into a, "Meh. Has Vargas lost her lustre for me, already? "

I think it had more to do with the werewolf theme. "Werewolves ... pshaw!"

If you hear him howling around your kitchen door
Better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

A not-so-little "old-ish" lady did get mutilated late at night. I would have been thrilled with this turn of events, when I was 13, but now, not so much. I've seen enough show more werewolves in real life to not get all shaken up about them when I encounter them in fiction.

So, merrily I went, like Little Red Riding Hood's older, wiser sister, thinking I was just tripping my way to a very mediocre, petite surprise ending.

And then .... Aaaaoooooo .... werewolves of London ... jumped out at me in the mountain regions of France!

"Well done, Vargas!" I thought. "You really pulled it off."

It turns out she hadn't been stringing me along -- and she had told me about it quite early in the book. Quite early. And I didn't see. I didn't pay any attention at all because I was too focused on the werewolf sipping his pina colada at Trader Vic's.

How could I have been so unaware? I'm usually pretty good (very good) at figuring it all out quite early in the game, but this time ... nothing. Well, maybe just the tiniest whisper, but I dismissed it right away because I thought I was imagining things. Reading about werewolves in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere will tend to raise the hackles even if you are a big girl who says she's too realistic/wise/canny to know that there are werewolves out there. I dismissed it so completely that when the werewolf jumped out, I can honestly say I hadn't seen the forest for the trees. That forest, where the werewolf had been hiding.

There really was a hairy handed gent, who'd previously run amok in Kent.

Once again, Vargas hits it home for me! show less

Homo homini lupus est

When you have the feeling that the formula of a long-running crime series is getting a bit dull, the classic trick for varying the pace and inserting some extra tension is to use a plot where the detective is not brought into contact with the crime until somewhere in the final chapters, leaving your Harriet/Doctor Watson character the first two hundred pages or so to struggle with the mystery unsupported. There aren't many crime writers who would have the nerve to do this already in the second book of a series, especially when the Harriet in question was offstage for almost the whole of the first book. But Fred Vargas is clearly someone who doesn't feel the need to follow the rulebook (to paraphrase a catchphrase show more from this novel...).

What we get is an entertaining road-mouvie, in which a female plumber/composer drives the only-black-man-in-the-village and an ancient shepherd around southern France in the country's smelliest motor-caravan, in pursuit of a suspected werewolf. And why not? The actual mystery is almost an afterthought (with a solution that's not all that difficult to guess from the outset), but most of the interest of the story is in the engagingly offbeat interactions between the three eccentric pursuers, which become even more interesting once the chronically offbeat Commissaire Adamsberg joins the party. Great fun, and definitely not a book where you stop to ask yourself too many questions about how implausible it all is. show less

There are people born without hair on the outside of their bodies; if you slit open their skin from throat to groin, you may find hair instead on the inside of the skin. This is the mark of a werewolf, or so the people of the remote French Alps believe. Unfortunately, much like the various tests to prove a woman is a witch, either way the suspect is dead.

So when a rather odd man, one who keeps to himself and who does not have body hair, disappears at the same time that livestock and people begin to be slaughtered, the old rumors re-emerge in this region of the French Alps where the incidents are occurring in a straight line seemingly heading to a purposeful destination.

Two workers, one elderly, one mentally challenged, had become show more family to a woman farm owner apparently slaughtered by the beast. They borrow a farm truck turned camper to follow the trail. They convince a young woman to be their driver along the narrow, twisty Alp roads.

Eventually, the case catches the eye of Chief Inspector Adamsberg, who believes there is more to the tale than a werewolf. And it doesn’t hurt that the driver of the old truck is a former lover.

I enjoyed this quirky mystery with the hint of the supernatural beast as the suspect and the angsty love.

Mysteries are my relaxation read; I intend to continue with this series. show less

In a remote French village, sheep are being killed, seemingly by wolves. When an irascible sheep farmer gets killed as well, the talk turns instead to werewolves. Her adopted son and her taciturn shepherd are determined to track down the man they think is responsible, and they persuade a young woman to accompany them as their driver.

I really liked the ending to this book, but it is preceded by 200 pages of arrant nonsense. We are expected to credit that there is widespread and uncritical acceptance of werewolf superstitions in modern France. We are expected to believe that two farm workers who have spent a life on the land have never learned to drive. We are expected to believe that a young woman, in her first ever attempt at driving a show more livestock truck manages to manoeuvre it around miles of narrow Alpine switchback roads without mishap. And that's just the start. This book is just silly. show less

I find Vargas' novels unusual and very compelling.

But...in this one; Seeking Whom He May Devour I found 2 problems. The first is how late in the story line, and seemingly out of the blue Adamsberg relates an old murder case that took place in the US. The 2nd is that despite a number of red herrings, and because the novel plods through the savage killings of sheep in multiple locations, I realized who was responsible about 2/3 of the way through the book.

But I still found it a good, solid read. Not surprising but still incredibly disconcerting and frightening to read how under stressful circumstances people allow themselves to be manipulated into believing the worst about anyone who is a bit 'different.'

First Line: On Tuesday, four sheep were killed at Ventebrune in the French Alps.

A small mountain village in the French Alps awakens each morning to the grisly sight of yet more sheep with their throats torn out. A local insists that it's the work of a werewolf, and when she is found killed in the same manner, people begin to wonder if she was right.

Soon an unlikely little group forms of the murdered woman's son, one of her shepherds, and her friend Camille. They've decided that a local eccentric named Massart is the werewolf, and since he's nowhere to be seen, they're going to find his trail and catch him. On their comedy-of-errors road trip, it doesn't take them long to realize that they just don't have what it takes to apprehend a show more werewolf, and Camille summons Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg to help them. Adamsberg finds that there are many layers of buried secrets for his intuition to unravel.

Adamsberg has been compared to Maigret, and I can't help but chuckle at his choice of venue for deep thinking:

"The Waters of Liffey provided a first-rate solution to his dilemma. The only people in the bar were noisy, boozy Irishmen speaking what was for Adamsberg a completely hermetic tongue. He thought he must be one of the last people left on the planet to know not a single word of English. Such old-fashioned ignorance allowed him to fit happily into the Liffey, where he could enjoy the stream of life without being in any way inconvenienced by it. In this precious hidey-hole Adamsberg spent many an hour dreaming away, peacefully waiting for ideas to rise to the surface if his mind."

The stars of Seeking Whom He May Devour are, without doubt, the wonderful cast of characters and the eerie, creepy atmosphere high in the mountains with few people around. Vargas came close a time or two to getting me to believe in werewolves.

As much as I enjoyed the characters and the atmospheric setting, I did find the plot to be a bit of a letdown. When one of the characters was described, I knew that person was the killer immediately. If I hadn't known this so quickly, I think Vargas would have had the hair standing on the back of my neck. I missed that element of suspense in what was otherwise a very good book.

I happened to read this book in the series out of order, skipping from the first book to the third. Vargas provided just enough backstory to keep me grounded without bogging down the plot. show less

Vargas has got to be the most distinctive contemporary crime writer in France. Her rules are simple: place and character are everything. Inspector Adamsberg is a holy fool, a resolutely irrational detective whose intuitions triumph where cold logic fails. Backed up by a host of secondary characters whose talents and foibles make of them an unruly but wholly sympathetic family, he muses his way through the convoluted crimes Vargas throws in his path.