After a happy time doing January in Japan on bookstagram, I was pretty eager to continue with February in France. Since I’m pretty unfamiliar with the genre, I had a pretty fun time looking for books. I ended up focusing on mysteries because that’s a genre I love and it felt more accessible, eventually borrowing Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas,

Have Mercy on Us All is the fourth book in the Commissaire Adamsberg series and it deals with a serial killer using The Plague. We start off with a town crier who’s been receiving a series of bizarre messages. They pay well, so the messages are cried out and a curious resident soon figure out that they portend a return of The Plague. At the same time, Commissaire Principal Adamsberg has been receiving of strange backward “4”s been written on doors across Paris. Soon, black bodies bitten by fleas are found…

Although I jumped into the series, I had a lot of fun with it once I started getting into the flow of things. The bodies don’t appear until everything has been set up, and that takes quite a while, which worked because it also took me two or three chapters to get into the narrative flow. But once I got a grasp of the main characters and interested in the mystery of the announcements, the bodies started turning up and I was hooked on the story.

As for characters, we have Joss, the town crier, Decambrais, someone who’s interested in the messages, Adamsberg, and his right-hand man Danglard. Joss, Decambrais, and Danglard made sense, but Adamsberg was pretty unique. Adamsberg has a rather abstract way of thinking that for some reason reminded me of Peter Whimsy. I suspect that me jumping into book four didn’t help matters, because the personal life of Adamsberg made no sense to me – sure, he was described as someone who’s more intuitive than logical, but he seemed like many eccentric detectives who star in novels and his eccentric personal life didn’t make as much sense to me. Perhaps it will if I go back and read book one.

Something I thought interesting was the setting. I will admit that I wasn’t sure that it was in Paris for a good part of the novel, and I suspect it’s because I’ve got some idealised version of the city in my head. I’ve never visited so all my notions of Paris comes from books, movies, and TV shows that show a fictionalised version of the place. The Paris here is dark and rougher, and I appreciated the book for showing me another aspect of the city. It can be dangerous to build up one idea of a city that you’ve never visited in.

Overall, I enjoyed this mystery. It took some time for me to get used to the style of the book, but I enjoyed it immensely once I did. I’ll definitely be interested in reading more of the Commissair Adamsberg series in the future.

Featured Image: Photo from Canva