An Uncertain Place

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“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

From the #1 bestselling French author and four-time winner of the Crime Writers’ Association’s International Dagger Award.

When Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, the chief of police in Paris’s seventh arrondissement, is called to the scene of a ghastly and highly unusual murder, he thinks it can’t have anything to do with the nine pairs of shoes and severed feet discovered outside of London’s Highgate Cemetery just a few days earlier. With the help of the murdered man’s gifted physician, Adamsberg delves into the victim’s disturbed psyche and unexpectedly finds himself on a path that takes him deep into the haunted past of Eastern Europe, where a centuries-old horror has come to life and is claiming victims far and wide.

“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 Fred Vargas, historian and archaeologist, is a number-one bestselling author in France, Germany and Italy. She is the author of eight novels featuring Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, and has won the Crime Writers’ Association’s International Dagger Award three out of the last five years.US

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