Inspector Maigret

Emile Ducrau, the kingpin of a small town on the outskirts of Paris, is stabbed and left for dead in the harbor one night. When he’s pulled from the water and miraculously revived, he enlists the help of Maigret to figure out who was behind the attempted murder. As Maigret sorts through the complex web of deceit, abuse, money, and power that darken Emile’s many dealings in the town, he must also deal with the specter of his own looming retirement.

When Maigret’s police officer nephew is framed for a gangland murder, the former chief inspector must swap his countryside retirement for his old stomping ground: Paris’s seamy underworld. Fueled by regular tipples and his omnipresent pipe, he goes up against a criminal enterprise whose leader, a police informant, considers himself untouchable. Can Maigret’s forensic but off-the-books investigation save his nephew from prison—and uphold his own legacy as a peerless maverick for justice?

A new translation of this gripping novel which sees the inspector brought out of his peaceful retirement. Maigret shrugged his shoulders, buried his hands in his pockets and went off without answering. He had just spent one of the most wretched days in his life. For hours, in his corner he had felt old and feeble, without idea or incentive. But now a tiny flame flickered. 'You bet we'll see' he growled.

In a run-down Paris suburb, housebound widow Juliette Boynet is strangled. For Inspector Maigret, this murder hits home more than most: he’s well acquainted with Juliette’s live-in carer, her selfless niece Cécile. For months, the frightened young woman has complained of an unseen nocturnal intruder. And less than twenty-four hours after her aunt’s murder, Cécile is also found dead. She didn’t have an overactive imagination after all, Maigret reflects guiltily.

A new translation of this moving novel about the destructive power of greed. Poor Cécile! And yet she was still young. Maigret had seen her papers: barely 28 years old. But it would be difficult to look more like an old maid, to move less gracefully, in spite of the care she took to be friendly and pleasant. Those black dresses that she must make for herself from bad paper patterns, that ridiculous green hat!

When the glamorous wife of an American industrialist is murdered at a luxury Paris hotel, her past life as a nightclub dancer is the key to finding the killer. As Maigret traces surprising connections between the dead woman and the hotel’s belowstairs staff, a story of unrequited love, self-reinvention, and blackmail emerges—with one tragic, luckless suspect at the center. Yet as Maigret knows, even the most compelling evidence isn’t infallible.

The dark side of glamorous expat life in Paris is brought to life in this new translation. Try to imagine a guest, a wealthy woman, staying at the Majestic with her husband, her son, a nurse and a governess...in a suite that costs more than a thousand francs a day.... At six in the morning, she's strangled, not in her room but in the basement locker room.... In all likelihood, that's where the crime was committed.... What was the woman doing in the basement? Who could have lured her down there, and how?

Exiled to a sleepy town in western France, Maigret is relieved when he has to handle a challenging case. There’s been a murder in a mussel farming village and its most respected resident, the former judge Monsieur Forlacroix, has tried to dispose of the body in the river. But why will no one admit to knowing the dead man? And what connects him to Forlacroix’s pianist daughter, Lise, who is kept locked in her bedroom? With studied patience and an eye for subliminal clues, Maigret teases out the dark secrets that everyone in this insular community, it seems, has a motive to protect.

Exiled from Paris, Maigret discovers some disturbing secrets in a sleepy coastal town in this new translation. A short, sprightly man appeared in the doorway, looked left and right, and went back into the passage. A moment later, the improbable happened. The little man reappeared, bent over, clinging to a long mass that he now started dragging through the mud. It must have been heavy. After four metres, he stopped to catch his breath. The front door of the house had been left open.

Tomorrow, at five in the afternoon, I will kill the clairvoyant. Signed, Picpus. This chilling message is seen scratched into a café blotting pad, prompting Maigret to place eighty fortune tellers under police watch. If it’s a hoax, he frets, he’ll never hear the end of it. Then the call comes in: clairvoyant Mademoiselle Jeanne has been fatally stabbed. While she lies dying, a senile old man is locked in an adjacent room. Maigret feels acute sympathy for this disheveled, bewildered figure—but who is he really?

Maigret dismantles an intricate network of lies stretching from Paris to Nice. Mechanically, he had put his pince-nez down on the blotter and looked at it there with his large, short-sighted eyes. It is at that moment that the strange thing happens. One of the lenses, acting as a mirror, reflected the criss-cross, hatched ink marks which had dried on the blotter, and he could just make out a couple of words.

It’s a rainy January, and Maigret has left Paris for the country on unofficial business—or, as he reflects, a stupid escapade. The examining magistrate’s brother-in-law is rumored to have killed his daughter’s lover, and Maigret is tasked with clearing the man’s name. Arriving in gloomy Saint-Aubin, Maigret meets with strangely little cooperation, both from the accused and from the ill-disposed townspeople. And why is Justin Cavre, aka “Cadaver,” a despised ex-police inspector turned private eye, throwing obstacles in his path?

Maigret's old colleague becomes an unexpected rival in book 24 of the new Penguin Maigret series. In everyone's eyes, even the old ladies hiding behind their quivering curtains, even the kids just now who had turned to stare after they had passed him, he was the intruder, the undesirable. No, worse, he was fundamentally untrustworthy, some stranger who had just turned up from who knew where to do who knew what.

Imperious, clever, mysterious: Maigret meets his match in the alluring form of Félicie in book 25 of the new Penguin Maigret series. In his mind's eye he would see that slim figure in the striking clothes, those wide eyes the colour of forget-me-not, the pert nose and especially the hat, that giddy crimson bonnet perched on the top of her head with a bronze-green feather shaped like a blade stuck in it.... Félicie had given him more trouble than all the 'hard' men who had been put behind bars.

It’s the height of spring, and Maigret is grappling with doubly unfamiliar circumstances. He’s in the surreal new village of Jeanneville, outside Paris, where an elderly bachelor has been shot dead in his home. Тhe prime witness, his twenty-four-year-old housekeeper, Félicie, may well be among Maigret’s most unnerving adversaries. Infuriatingly clever, singularly self-possessed, and overtly antagonistic, she is surely hiding something—but what?

Ernest Malik had been right when he had looked at Maigret with a smile that was a mixture of sarcasm and contempt. This wasn't a case for him. He was out of his depth. This world was unfamiliar to him, and he had difficulty piecing it all together. Peacefully tending his garden in the countryside, Maigret is called upon to investigate a rich family with skeletons in their cupboard - and finds himself confronted by lies, snobbery and malice.

What was it about him that had struck Maigret so forcefully? Little John had cold eyes! Four or five times in his life, he had met people with cold eyes, those eyes that can stare at you without establishing any human contact. Persuaded to sail to New York by a fearful young law student, Maigret finds himself drawn into the city's underworld and a wealthy businessman's closely guarded past.

At what point in the day could the note have been slipped into his pocket, his left breast pocket? It was an ordinary sheet of glazed squared paper, probably torn out of an exercise book. The words were written in pencil, in a regular handwriting that looked to him like a woman's. For pity's sake, ask to see the patient in room 15. When Inspector Maigret's wife falls ill on their seaside holiday, a visit to the hospital leads him on an unexpected quest to find justice for a young girl.

That shoeless foot looked incongruous lying on the pavement next to another foot encased in a shoe made of black kid leather. It was naked, private.... It was Maigret who retrieved the other shoe, which lay by the kerb six or seven metres away. A series of strange phone calls leads Inspector Maigret through the Paris streets towards a man out of his depth amid a network of merciless criminals.

A sparkling new translation of this flashback to the start of Inspector Maigret's career, part of the new Penguin Maigret series. The profession he had always yearned for did not actually exist...he imagined a cross between a doctor and a priest - a man capable of understanding another's destiny at first glance. The very first investigation by eager young police secretary Jules Maigret leads him to a wealthy Paris family's dark secrets.