Maigret et la jeune morte - Georges Simenon

In a seemingly a rather straightforward procedural, Maigret investigates the death of an unknown woman found beaten to death and left in a public square in Montmartre.  The actual procedural, the results of the autopsy, the reporting of the incident in the newspapers, the following up on leads, the interviewing of people who all knew the woman but did not know her well and did not for various reasons come forward, all make the revelations about the mysterious woman intriguing, but Simenon makes it much more than this.

Maigret’s investigation runs in parallel with another dour and indefatigable inspector known as Malgracieux, who through sheer persistence and old-school methods always seems to be one step ahead of Maigret - right up until the final revelations.  There it’s Maigret’s experience and his ability to put himself in the place of the victim (here as often a young person who has come to the big city from the country like Maigret) and his sense of intuition that show that there is more to crime investigation than sheer legwork.