Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand.
This quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth informs the title and content of this book, the fourth in the Commissaire Adamsberg series by the French writer Fred Vargas. Adamsberg and a few collegues from his division are set to travel to Quebec for a forensics conference. His right hand man, Danglard is just sure that the plane will go down over the Atlantic ( a flock of starlings whoosh into the engines) and is dragging his feet and drinking maybe a little more than he should. The powers that be will not be dissuaded and they are set to leave. In the mean
time, Adamsberg gets reminded about one of the great obsessions of his career; a case involving a judge, a trident, his brother and several decades of murders. He does some quick investigating and is convinced that the judge has struck again, but can do nothing about it because they are leaving for Canada.
While the team is in Gatineau, a woman is murdered in the same style. What is frightening for us and for the commissaire, is that he is the prime suspect. On the night in question, he drank too much and blacked out (something that is very rare for our cloud shoveller) and has to contend with the horrible thought that perhaps he did do it after all.
I don’t want to give too much of this away, because I really enjoyed getting involved in this convoluted and absorbing story, witnessing Adamsberg’s unique process and learning ever more about his back story. Some characters from past novels make appearances and we are introduced to more that I hope to see in the future. My favorite novel in this series so far.
