Seeking Whom He May Devour
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Written by Fred Vargas.
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Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
Each day, inhabitants of a small community in the French Alps find another of their ewes with its throat cut. When one of the villagers too is killed people begin to wonder: could it be the work of a werewolf? Soon suspicion falls on Massart, one of the villagers, because of his beardlessness (according to popular legend, werewolves have no hair on their bodies because they are inside the body).Soliman, the victim's adopted son; Le Veilleur, a lonely sheperd and Camille, a lovely girl from the city, decide to pursue Massart and their hunt leads them into the Alps, but their incompetence is undisguisable and they decide to summon Commissaire Adamsberg — well known for his peculiar investigation methods — to help. Thanks to his extraordinary intuition, Adamsberg unearths an astonishing truth, one that the villagers are going to find hard to believe.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Fence thinks this book is Excellent.
Yes again a cover influenced purchase, so I am glad to report that a good cover can lead to a good read too. I really enjoyed this book. The language, characters and descriptions are fantastic, so I suppose a lot of praise must also go to the translater as well.
The book opens with the character of Lawrence Donald Johnstone, a Canadian in France to film wolves. He’s been away from his true love, grizzly bears, for far too long, and is rooting in in Mercantour. Not only for the skinny European wolves, although he has come to love them, but also because there’s a woman, Camille, in his life.
But when dead sheep, always ewes are found the locals begin to look at the “foreign Italian wolves†with suspicion and hate. They organise local hunts. Coming to believe that it is all the work of one, huge, extraordinary animal.
Camille has her own ideas, especially after a friend Suzanne is found killed just like a sheep. She begins to suspect that a local is responsible. She doesn’t buy into Suzanne’s theory of a werewolf, but she sets out along with Watchee the shepard and Soliman, Suzanne’s adopted son to track down the killer. Things, however, do not turn out to be quite as straight forward as she’d hoped, and she is forced to ask an old friend for help. This old flame is Commissaire Adamsberg. And he is quite a character.
"That is how Adamsberg used his brain, like an ocean that you trust entirely to feed you well, but wich you’ve long ago given up trying to tame."
I loved Adamsberg. He is so very different from the logical reasoning detective in the Sherlock Holmes mode. Instead he is an interesting, fascinating character, with his own, highly personal way of getting things done.
"Splitting a guy in two goes beyond the legal limits of violence between neighbours"
I enjoyed it so much, that had I not been the final stop on the train I may actually have missed it, I was so engrossed in the book.
"Camille shrugged. “Sometimes things just click for all sorts of lousy reasons, but loads of good reasons just cant unclick them ever again.â€"