Wash this Blood Clean from my Hand by Fred Vargas

In this volume of the Commissaire Adamsberg investigates series, Fred Vargas features a visit by Paris police to GRC HQ in Gatineau, Quebec. This leads to some hilarious linguistic and cultural miscommunication between casual Quebecois cops and their formal French colleagues.

From the medieval Strasbourg Cathedral to the strange Pink Lake in the Quebec bush, the intuitive Commissaire Adamsberg dogs the Trident, a serial killer whose crimes span five decades, and may even reach into the afterworld.

Delightfully drawn characters sport all kinds of oddities and contradictions. Robin Hood figure Josette, the aged "hackeress," makes a castle of her rice pudding at the dinner table, provoking her elderly hostess Clementine to ask her not to play with her food.

Across this same dinner table, Adamsberg ponders the fate of his boss, who has taken a big risk to support him. Brezillon, he explains, "puts out his fag with his thumb without burning himself," making him a "good guy." Thus, reasons the commissaire, he "can't compromise him."

Sheltered by the two aged women, Adamsberg thinks, plans and investigates. While Josette helps by hunching happily over her hacking, Clementine plies the nervous and underfed detective with cookies and maple syrup, and stands over him to ensure that he is "eating up as instructed."

Meanwhile, Adamsberg helps his hostess by carrying the shopping. In her kitchen, he learns to peel potatoes properly, removing the eyes first. Obediently stirring the pan in a figure eight so as "not to  ruin the bechamel sauce," he imagines a confrontation with the villain, telling himself he will not "be reduced to ashes by the pressure of a cane on his chest from this would-be aristocrat."

Tongue firmly in cheek, the author treats us to a wide variety of classic scenes. We see the village priest's memory as "a telephoto lens into the past," and witness an exhumation in the winter rain. Sensing the approach of a hunch, the eccentric detective treats intuitions "like an angler handling a bite," and refrains from pouncing on an idea until it is "safely landed in his conscious brain."

Much depends on the frail old hacker, but big barriers must first be overcome. As Adamsberg comments sadly, 'you can't break into the files of life like you can into computers.'

The plot is outrageous, straining the very edges of credibility. Yet the authorial hand evokes instinctive trust in the reader, who is more than willing to suspend disbelief for as long as it takes to untangle the tale. A historian and archeologist by profession, Parisienne author Fred Vargas (her nom de plume) has taken the mystery genre by storm.