A case involving a countess's shadowy past draws Chief Inspector Maigret into the world of striptease artists and morphine addicts.

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré When a Montmarte stripper overhears a plot to murder a countess, Inspector Maigret is on the case Arlette, a beautiful young dancer at Picratt’s in Montmartre, reports to her local police station that she overheard two men at her club talking about planning to kill a countess. The police don’t think much of the claim—that is, until a few hours later when Arlette is found in her room, strangled to death. The police scramble to track down the men in question, but the next day the Countess von Farnheim, a drug addict living not far from Picratt’s, is found strangled. When Arlette’s own identity turns out to have been falsified, Inspector Maigret steps in and must dive into Paris’s seedy underbelly to discover the truth—before the killers can slip away.

Maigret baits a trap to lure the murderer of five women, brutally knifed in the streets of Montmartre.

'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray 'What he thought he had discovered, in place of the joyful candour that she usually displayed, was an irony which was neither less cheerful nor less childish, but which troubled him ... He wondered now if his exultation wasn't down to the fact that she was playing a part, not just to deceive him, not just to hide something from him, but for the pleasure of acting a part' When one of his best inspectors is shot, Maigret decides to book himself into Mademoiselle Clément's well-kept Paris boarding house nearby in order to find the culprit. 'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century' Guardian 'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent

When a prominent figure from the Paris restaurant world turns up dead, Inspector Maigret is on the case The body of a well-known Parisian restaurateur turns up on Avenue Junot in Montmartre, having seemingly been killed elsewhere. Inspector Maigret dives into the investigation and soon discovers that the murder may be gang-related after a colleague working in the red-light district receives a tip from an anonymous informer. Deeply engrossing, and revealing insights about the class-conscious world of the Paris elite, Maigret and the Informer draws the reader into a complicated case that could hinge on one man's word.

The Inspector must enter the unsavory world of politics to help a conscientious politician. Maigret is secretly summoned by a distraught cabinet minister who needs help in recovering a document - the Calame report, an engineering study that warned that a government-funded children's sanitarium was of unstable design. The study was hushed up, the report stolen, and the disaster made reality - with 128 children killed in the building's collapse. Now Maigret must plumb the depths of government corruption to find the thief and the report - and let the compromised government fall where it may.