A Climate of Fear

January 9, 2017
In Vargas’s captivating eighth Commissaire Adamsberg mystery (after 2013’s The Ghost Riders of Ordebec), the dreamily brilliant Paris police commissioner, assisted by his baffled, balky team of underlings, investigates the deaths of members of the Association for the Study of the Writings of Maximilien Robespierre, a group devoted to studying the French Revolution. The first victim, Alice Gauthier, ran a bath, took off her shoes, climbed into the water fully clothed, and then apparently slit her wrists, but Adamsberg suspects foul play. A decade earlier, Gauthier made an ill-fated trip to an island off of Iceland. When the second victim turns out to have been on the same trip, Adamsberg is sure there’s a link between the present-day murders and a tragedy that occurred on the Icelandic island back then. Acting on his intuition, the policeman decides to lead an expedition to the island, reputed to be haunted by an Arctic demon, in the hope of finding some answers. Vargas keeps introducing unexpected, fascinating new plot elements, even as the action totters on the brink of absurdity.

February 1, 2017
A pair of suspicious suicides are linked to each other and to the "godforsaken rock" that irrevocably changed the victims' lives a decade ago.In April in Paris, there's still a nip in the air, so conditions aren't ideal for frail Alice Gauthier to take a walk. When she suffers a fall, Marie-France, a helpful passer-by, gathers the contents of her spilled purse, noticing an unsent letter only after the lady is on her way. The day after Marie-France duly posts the letter, Madame Gauthier is found dead in her bathtub, an apparent suicide. But when Commissaire Adamsberg (An Uncertain Place, 2011, etc.) and his sidekick, Danglard, investigate, many small details argue against a ruling of suicide, and a scrawled Cyrillic character near the body is a genuine conundrum. Not long afterward, esteemed chemist Henri Masfaure shoots himself, and Danglard finds a letter to him from Madame Gauthier at the crime scene. It links them via an expedition to Iceland a decade ago that ended in tragedy. When Adamsberg and Danglard track down the other members of the party, they are unsurprisingly met with obfuscation and lies. Yet another alleged suicide, this one involving a knife in the belly, raises the stakes in the duo's pursuit of a bold and perhaps desperate serial killer. The intricate eighth installment in this Parisian series delights with its interesting characters, engaging dialogue, and infectious sense of curiosity about the lives of others.

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November 1, 2016

A four-time winner of the International Crime Writers' Association's International Dagger Award, Paris-based Vargas returns with another policier starring Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. Here, the commissaire must reckon with the murder of two people who were part of an expedition to Iceland gone catastrophically wrong ten years earlier.

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