The water wins in the end

“When Danglard was in a bad way, the Unsolved Question in the infinite cosmos returned to plague him, as well as the fact that the sun would explode in four billion years, and that humanity was but a miserable and desperate chance occurrence on a piece of matter whirling through space.”

Deeper and deeper we go into the world of Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg  and his Serious Crime squad with this, the 5th in the series. Other than Danglard’s pondering’s, this novel features two pivotal characters from his distant past, the revelation that Adamsberg is now a father, a potion for eternal life, contact with some quirky denizens of Normandy and a surprisingly breathtaking sequence where they use the office cat, Snowball, to track one of their own. Sure some of this sounds ludicrous, that’s why I can’t say enough good things about Vargas, because not only does she make all of this work, she does it with an elan and depth that is rare in the majority of crime fiction.

At the beginning of the book, there is a bit of a territorial war between the Serious Crime squad and the drugs unit. Adamsberg is convinced that two recently murdered men were not the victims of a drug deal gone bad but something deeper and more sinister. Trying to convince his boss ( and a few within his ownsquad) that they should pursue this case, he enlists the help and expertise of one of France’s premier pathologists and an expert in murderers with dissociative identity disorder.

More characters from the previous books make their appearances, among them Matthais the prehistorian from The Three Evangelists as well as The Chalk Circle Man, Dr. Roman the pathologist and of course, Camille Forestier. The farther I get in this series, the more I want to spend time among these endlessly absorbing and interesting people.