I've always had a soft spot for Commissaire Adamsberg, and for Fred Vargas. Not this time. The book begins in London with a pile of shoes with severed feet inside, returns to France and a singularly gruesome murder, and ends up in Serbia with a clutch of vampires. Everything turns out to be connected, of course. It's all very clever and well thought-out, but as coincidence piled on coincidence, as ever more improbable people in the dramatis personae proved to be linked, I lost patience. I read to the end, but with diminishing enthusiasm. It was obvious that all the horror would unpick, that the right people would get their just deserts, and that the other right people would live happily ever after. And so it turned out. ( )

I enjoy the mixture of folklore,horror and mystery that Vargas creates. Best Togo into it not knowing where it is leading, though, it's more fun that way ( )

I'm reading the English translation, but Goodreads doesn't have it. ( )

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This is number 6 in the Parisian Commissaire/Chief Inspector Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg police procedural mysteries, but it's actually the first I've read.

While the Commissaire is attending a meeting in London, he and an English policeman discover eight and a half pairs of shoes with severed feet in them. Bizarrely, they are lined up as if wanting to enter the ancient and eerie, much-storied Highgate Cemetery.

After returning to Paris, the Commissaire is called to the site of an incredibly violent murder. The victim was not only dismembered but entirely severed into very small pieces.

The two macabre events converge and part of the answer seems to lie in Serbia at the grave of a ‘centuries old horror’ (quote from back cover) of a still feared vampire.

Lots of nicely written twists and turns kept me guessing; the bit of supernatural horror was just enough to make it interesting, but not necessarily push it into another genre of mystery. It’s a series that I will continue. ( )