Félicie

“One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories.” —The GuardianA story of love and obsession featuring a most memorable femme fatale, starring the intrepid Inspector Maigret Peg Leg Lapie, a crusty old sailor, is found mysteriously murdered in a most incongruous setting: a picturesque cottage near Paris, where he lived attended only by his young housekeeper, Félicie. But Lapie was not alone—Maigret, chief inspector of the Paris police, is sure of it. A man at work in his garden, wearing clogs and a straw hat, does not suddenly drop his tools to go indoors and fetch a bottle of brandy to drink alone in the summerhouse. There must have been another glass that someone removed. But Félicie, in her red hat trimmed with an iridescent feather, proves a champion adversary, as skilled in innuendo and evasion as Maigret is in deduction.