Madame Maigret's Friend (Inspector Maigret) - by Georges Simenon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Maigret must wade through a media frenzy when news of a body found in a stove spreads across Paris. Who is the corpse, and how is the case connected to Madame Maigret?

A gruesome mystery has the whole of Paris agog: who is "the corpse in the stove"? The stove's owner, a reclusive Belgian bookbinder detained in the Santé prison, isn't saying. His ambitious young lawyer, meanwhile, keeps giving combative press interviews, stoking public fascination to a fever pitch. As Maigret and his team triage a flood of tip-offs, the case throws up a series of unexpected connections--even, bizarrely, to Madame Maigret. Plotted with a watchmaker's intricacy, Madame Maigret's Friend is a hypnotic journey through a city where everyone's lives are enmeshed, whether they realize it or not.

About the Author

Georges Simenon (1903-1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. An intrepid traveler with a profound interest in people, Simenon strove on and off the page to understand--and not to judge--the human condition in all its shades. His books include the Inspector Maigret series and a richly varied body of wider work united by its evocative power, its economy of means, and its penetrating psychological insight. He is among the most widely read writers in the global canon.

Howard Curtis lives in Norwich, England, and has translated more than a hundred books from the French, Italian, and Spanish.