It’s Friday evening on Labor Day weekend. Steve Hogan and his wife Nancy are meeting at their usual watering hole in Manhattan after work. From there they will drive home to Long Island and prepare for the trip to Maine where they will retrieve their children, who have been away at summer camp. Steve is hot and tired and more than a little annoyed that his wife whisked them out of the bar and on the road before he could unwind with a second martini. […]
the great surging tide of humanity
Everybody at the Quai des Orfevres knows that murders rarely happen on Mondays, but one cold and rainy Monday, Maigret is called in on a murder in the Third Arrondissement. It turns out to be one of the knottier cases for Maigret to untangle because the murder victim himself is a bit of an enigma. Lion’s share of the story is devoted to Maigret and his team trying to uncover who Louis Thouret really was at the time of his death. How did this humble shopkeeper and hen-pecked […]
Maigret had no method
Maigret is out-of-sorts. What could the Scotland Yard man be thinking of him? He had come to study “Maigret’s methods” and Maigret had no method. He found only a large, rather clumsy man who must appear to him to be the prototype of the French public servant. How long would be go on following him about like that? Then one cold, blustery and rainy day in Paris he learns that a murder victim down south had evoked his name just days before being killed. The […]
toiling upward in the night
In case you were worried, Sebastian Clifton did not die in that horrible car crash. Since it’s the early sixties, there are no cell phones, so Don Pedro Martinez cannot stop the hit on Sebastian when he learns that his youngest son Bruno is in the car. The inevitable happens, and while Sebastian is seriously injured, it was Bruno who perished. Now old Don Pedro is really pissed. If you thought he had gone to extraordinary lengths to bring the Clifton and Barrington families to […]