Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand - (Commissaire Adamsberg Mystery) by Fred Vargas (Paperback)

About the Book

In this remarkable addition to the Commissaire Adamsberg series, a serial killer has followed Adamsberg to Canada on his training mission in a novel that will keep readers spellbound until the very end.

Book Synopsis

"Wildly imaginative."--The New York Times

"Adamsberg is a terrific creation and his team of misfits a joy to watch in action."--Peter Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of the Inspector Banks series

Three wounds in a perfectly straight line was the bloody signature that marked victims from every corner of France who had been murdered over the course of thirty years. Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, the chief of police in Paris's 7th Arrondissement, is deeply and personally familiar with the case, and though others were always framed and convicted for these crimes, including his own brother, the Commissaire knows the true identity of the killer--and knows that the murderer died in 1987. All the more disturbing, then, is Adamsberg's discovery one morning of a fresh murder with exactly the same profile...

Review Quotes

Praise for Fred Vargas and the Commissaire Adamsberg mysteries

"Wry humor and offbeat plots blend with a subtly dangerous charm to make Fred Vargas the queen of French crime writers." --Martin Walker, author of the Bruno, Chief of Police Series

"Vargas writes with the startling imagery and absurdist wit of a latter-day Anouilh, about fey characters who live in a wonderful bohemian world that never was but should have been." --The New York Times Book Review

"Spry, ironic, yet fully engaged with the horror of contemporary reality" --Los Angeles Times

"It's a full, rich and strange plate." --Seattle Times

"[A] high degree of intelligence, sophistication and perversity informs [Vargas'] fiction...I continue to be delighted by the workings of [her] imagination. It's a tangled web she weaves, and a hard one to escape."--Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post

"Few crime stories are as apt to leave a reader wondering so ardently: Who dunnit?...Vargas' characters are like something out of a fairy tale - eternal opposites, ever-renewing archetypes despite their fresh adventures each time. That's why each novel's opening feels new." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Anyone who enjoys kooky characters and intricate detail will happily follow Vargas along." --Entertainment Weekly

"As droll and fascinating as la ville lumière itself." --Kirkus Reviews

"Adamsberg, always an intuitive sleuth rather than a rational one, is the perfect hero for a series where reality is always a moving target." --Booklist

"Vargas is, by some distance, the hottest property in contemporary crime fiction." --The Guardian (London)

About the Author

Fred Vargas is a French medieval historian and archaeologist who has a parallel career as a bestselling crime novelist. She adopted the pseudonym from her twin sister, an artist who works as Jo Vargas--after Ava Gardner's character in The Barefoot Contessa. She has published ten mysteries, five of which feature Commissaire Adamsberg. Her detective fiction is published in 32 languages.