The Shadow Puppet: Inspector Maigret(Inspector Maigret)

A family tragedy set in Simenon's own apartment block, newly translated as part of the Maigret series On a corner of the desk, the police gazette lay open, showing twenty or so photographs of wanted individuals. Most of them faces of thugs. Heads that bore the scars of degeneracy . . . And the warning, in red, Dangerous. Is still armed. A fellow who would not sell himself cheaply. Well! Maigret would have preferred that to all this syrupy greyness, to these family sagas, to this still inexplicable murder which he found mind-boggling.

About the Author :
Georges Simenon (Author) Georges Simenon was born in Li ge, Belgium in 1903. An intrepid traveller with a profound interest in people, Simenon strove on and off the page to understand, rather than to judge, the human condition in all its shades. His novels 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. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life. Ros Schwartz (Translator) Ros Schwartz is an award-winning translator from French. Acclaimed for her new version of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, published in 2010, she has over 100 fiction and non-fiction titles to her name. The French government made Ros a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009, and in 2017 she was awarded the Institute of Translation and Interpreting's John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence.

Review :
One of the greatest writers of the 20th century . . . no other writer can set up a scene as sharply and with such economy as Simenon does . . . the conjuring of a world, a place, a time, a set of characters - above all, an atmosphere Gem-hard soul-probes . . . not just the world's bestselling detective series, but an imperishable literary legend . . . he exposes secrets and crimes not by forensic wizardry, but by the melded powers of therapist, philosopher and confessor Terrific...the 75 Inspector Maigret books are almost uniformly wonderful. They are not crime or even detective fiction as ordinarily understood...they are about human foibles, moral failings and compromises, set in an evocatively atmospheric Paris A great writer of detail, of atmosphere A genius … Simenon broke all the rules The novels brim with atmosphere, insight and intelligence . . . quite unlike anything else written before or since Exceptional… Simenon’s writing still seems fresh…one of the great pleasures is the summoning of France’s many landscapes and accompanying social milieux . . . There is also, and it’s a chief glory of the books, a whole range of different Parises, from the shiny rich to the hypocritical bourgeois middle to the struggling, furious world of the poor, desperate and professionally criminal I never read contemporary fiction–with one exception: the works of Simenon One of the most important writers of our century An astute observer of human nature, writing in a spare and vivid style