Un lieu incertain - Fred Vargas

As is often the case with Fred Vargas and her Commissioner Adamsberg cases, strange things happen, sometimes an almost supernatural side tapping into dark myths, but always something bizarre, something never encountered before. It's only Adamsberg for example who would have strangeness follow him across the English channel at the start of Un lieu incertain, attending a conference in London on the Flow of Migration, and be greeted with the sight of 17 shoes arranged facing the gates of Highgate Cemetery, each of them still containing the severed feet of their owners.

Despite being very obviously an Adamsberg kind of problem, he tries to keep away from this one, finding himself occupied with another extreme case of his own back home. Pierre Vaudel, a retired journalist, 78, independently wealthy, has been found dead in his home. Or not so much found as obliterated, someone taking great care to cut up and hammer the pieces of his body into small fragments that are scattered across his living room. Like I say, an unusual killing like no other, except one other in Austria and maybe even more than that.

As is often the case with Adamsberg, with Vargas's writing, the connections established are also uncommon. A discussion between detectives on other strange things that people do; eating wardrobes, a plane even, someone killing and stuffing a bear that devoured their uncle, even helping a cat give birth to kittens all turn out to have abstract resonances that help Adamsberg form an understanding and put together seemingly impossible connections to the 'Zerquetscher', 'L'Ecraseur'. the Obliterator.  There's an unusual methodology here, but Vargas makes it work.

She even makes the supernatural side of things work too, as Adamsberg ends up having to travel to Serbia to discover the origins of some vampire lore that might have a connection to the case, finding a way to give it a basis in reality - or at least in some people's reality - without rationalising it entirely.  Un lieu incertain is full of fascinating little facts, Vargas tying everything together impressively into a grand conspiracy that inevitably involves Adamsberg in a personal as well as a professional way.  Impressive crime fiction as always, Un lieu incertain is thrilling, deeply original and completely unlike anything else in this field.