Fred Vargas really knows how to write an intriguing mystery! I loved this book and although it was my first Commissaire Adamsberg book, I went back and read the others that predate this one. Great police procedural and a very palatable way to learn some history as well.

Published in France in 2015; published in translation by Penguin Books on March 7, 2017

A Climate of Fear contains the memorable line, “Please, fetch me some horse manure. I want it now.” What more could a reader ask?

Alice Gauthier, with some help she never learns about, posts a letter just before she dies. Her death is regarded as a suicide, but the retired maths teacher seems an unlikely candidate to take her own life. She drew a sign before she died, and Commandant Adrien Danglard of the Serious Crime Squad is called upon to puzzle out its meaning due to his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure facts.

Tracking down the letter leads Danglard and Jean Baptiste Adamsberg and a few other Parisian crime investigators to another apparent suicide where the same strange sign appears, as well as an suspicious deaths in Iceland ten years earlier. The investigation begins with a myth about an Icelandic island where a warm stone is said to offer eternal life. There does, we eventually learn, seem to be something creepy about the island, where visitors seem more likely to find eternal death.

The investigation takes a twist when evidence suggests that the victims were studying the writings of Robespierre, sending the detectives to a club where the government of Robespierre is reenacted. Some members seem to have infiltrated the club to spy on others. Some members are secret descendants of people who were guillotined during the Revolution, and who may be pursuing an agenda of their own.

The various characters in the club get a bit carried away, which I might not find credible except that Americans get a bit carried away with their Civil War reenactments, so perhaps the French are no different in the allegiance to one side or the other in their colorful history.

Fred Vargas has a background in history and archeology, both of which play a role in A Climate of Fear. In fact, I learned considerably more about Robespierre than I really needed to know. Still, the detail with which Vargas reconstructs French history is also evident in the detailed plot, which ties together multiple killings in an odd conspiracy — but then, all conspiracies seem odd to people who have not embraced them.

A Climate of Fear moves at a sedate pace, taking time to develop characters and (mostly) background. The pace might be a bit too sedate, but that’s preferable to modern thriller writers who, sacrificing content for speed, don’t want to burden readers with sentences of more than five words. The pace does pick up a bit at the end, before the traditional information dump in which Adamsberg explains the plot and ties the storylines together.

The police characters have obviously been developed throughout the series (this is the first Adamsberg novel I’ve read) and their personalities are clearly established. The novel might have been tighter, but the complex mystery should appeal to readers who enjoy misdirection and the opportunity to unravel complex mysteries.

RECOMMENDED

“You don’t just go killing people left and right, for want of anything better to do.”

In A Climate of Fear from Fred Vargas, Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg returns to investigate a series of connected murders. Adamsberg is dragged into the death of an older, terminally ill woman who appears to be a suicide. It seems to be an open and shut case, but there are some niggling problems that gnaw at the edges of Adamsberg’s mind: Why was the woman so determined to post a letter shortly before her death? Who was the letter to and what did it contain? Finally what is the relevance of a sign drawn at the scene of the woman’s death? Then a helpful citizen steps forward with information about the letter, and Adamsberg goes to talk to the recipient only to find a second ‘suicide’ and the same sign left next to the dead man.

At the scene of the second ‘suicide,’ Adamsberg is told a strange, chilling story about a trip made to Iceland more than ten years earlier. The trip went horribly wrong and ended up like some frozen version of Lord of the Flies. The two ‘suicides’ were both people on the trip, and it seems that those former tourists are being bumped off one by one.


While attempting to puzzle through the Iceland Tourists murders in his own inimitable way, Adamsberg begins investigating a second series of murders occurring within the secretive “Association for the Study of the Writings of Maximilien Robespierre.” It turns out that Danglard, a walking encyclopedia, who “knows things that you won’t learn in thirty lifetimes,” is very familiar with the writings and speeches of Robespierre, and Danglard looks like a natural dressed in an elegant 18th century purple frock coat.

With two parallel investigations, Adamsberg’s team is stretched to the limit, and when the investigations stall, Adamsberg comes under criticism from some squad members–including the ever-faithful Danglard. Vargas shows most effectively that thought processes, which are unique to each individual (especially Adamsberg who tends to approach crime in an intuitive way,) isolate and in this case, frustrates many of Adamsberg’s fellow officers.

At 415 pages this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a tightly plotted crime novel, but I loved every page. For example, there’s a long section with Adamsberg and Danglard interviewing the woman who picked by a letter dropped by the first victim. This woman, Marie-France, has a dreamy, yet very specific thought process which Adamsberg relates to:

‘After that I thought it over, seven times, not any more.’

‘Seven times,’ Adamsberg murmured,

How could you count the number of times you thought something over?

‘Not five and not twenty. My father always said you should think something over seven times in your head, before you act, not less, because you might do something silly, but especially not more, or you’d go around and around in circles. And end up corkscrewed into the ground. Then you’re stuck. So I thought: this lady went out on her own to post this letter. So it must have been important, don’t you think?’

Vargas takes her time developing the crimes, the solutions and the dynamics of each crime milieu–in particular the Robespierre society. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: crime fiction, for its focus on the transgressive, is a great way to infiltrate a foreign culture, and in A Climate of Fear, we are cast back into the French Revolution. I had no idea that Robespierre was such a controversial figure, and Vargas explores the nuances of Robespierre’s character and why some people worship him and why others find him an object of hate. The psychology of historical reenactments as “an arena for people’s fantasies” is explored very well, and there are plenty of details about Robespierre, his downfall and death in this rich crime novel.

A Climate of Fear is the eighth in the Commissaire Adamsberg series (if you don’t count the graphic novel). It’s possible to jump in with this one if you feel so inclined as there’s not a great deal of information about Adamsberg’s personal life, and the relationships he has with his squad members is fairly self-explanatory. A couple of mentions are made of the past, and there are returning characters, but there’s not much that should interfere with enjoying this crime novel on its own.

Thanks to Emma for turning me onto Vargas in the first place

Translated by Siân Reynolds

I was at Powells the other day discussing great mystery writers with one of their employees who recommended Pierre Lemaitre. I checked, I have Camille in my queue to read soon. Since I was in the middle of A Climate of Fear, I urged her to check out Fred Vargas’s mystery series, though I warned her they are surreal. Now that I have finished A Climate of Fear, I am assured that they remain surreal, a strange blend of comic and noir with absolutely no procedural discipline.

This time it is not Commissaire Adamsberg sniffing out a mystery no one else perceives. The nose goes to another commissaire in another arrondissement who suspected a suicide was really a murder and a concerned citizen mailing a letter she picked up off the street that sparked his interest, but once Adamsberg was on the scent, he was not stopping. He soon discovered that there were other victims, also killed in ways that suggested suicide or accident and that the victims were connected in multiple ways.

Some ten years ago, two travelers died on a trip to Iceland. The official story is they froze to death, but Adamsberg suspects there is more to the mystery than that. At least two of the recent victims were on that trip. Could someone be killing the survivors? Nonetheless the statute of limitations has run out on those deaths, if they are murders. A more contemporary connection is discovered, they also attended the Association for the Study of the Writings of Maximilien Robespierre, a historical reenactment society. Iceland gives him a suspect list of nine, seven unknown. The Robespierre Society gives him a suspect list of seven hundred, also anonymous, but at least he can go see them in historical costume.

I enjoyed this most recent Adamsberg mystery more than the last two. In The Ghost Riders of Ordebec they seemed incredibly obtuse. I knew who the murderer was far too early and was incredibly frustrated that the usually intuitive Adamsberg was dense as a stone. Adamsberg’s uncanny intuition that allows him to make connections is back.

Nonetheless, the series is showing some signs of age with the repetition of quirks from past stories, the dangerous step in the station, the cat, the neighbor pissing on a tree, and the many individual quirks of the officers. This is a common failing of series authors. It feels as though they have an index card for each character with some defining characteristics and when that character pops up in the story, those tics are mentioned more or less verbatim. The problem is that people grow and change. More importantly, their colleagues habituate to their quirks, so when it is noted with equal importance in every book, it’s false. By book eight, Adamsberg will not be noting the same things about people as he did in the first. This is a small thing and Vargas is not alone–nearly every series author does this. Perhaps readers like the familiarity and I am just a weirdo who wants to see secondary characters grow and flourish.

Vargas did allow some character growth. I appreciated that Danglard stepped more outside his encyclopedic box, resisting Adamsberg and getting a small taste for power. Sadly, this was not a wise choice and I am afraid he might be back in the box in the future. Danglard is very much a useful character in that he knows everything. He is not in the least likely, but I don’t care. The point of Danglard and many of the other characters is they are representative of different ways of thinking. There are the disciplined proceduralists, the information gleaners, the talkers, the auditory, the visual, and the intuitive. Their success comes from the best use of their many ways of thinking.

As a mystery, A Climate of Fear is fair. The clues are there for us. The actual killer was in my list of suspects, but I was not able to winnow it down to the right one before Adamsberg, even though I should have because, as he told his colleagues, all the information was there for them and me to draw on.

Commissaire Adamsberg is confronted with a most intricate mystery. An elderly woman is found dead in her bathtub. What appears to be a suicide is proved to be murder. Her death has links to another possible suicide of a wealthy man in the French countryside. Adamsberg and his team link the deaths to a strange and disastrous trip both victims experienced in Iceland. Yet, there are other deaths and a strange graphic clue that leads the team to a Robespierre society bent on re-enactment. Adamsberg and his zany team of associates are tasked to make sense of these disparate threads if they hope to catch the killer(s). But the team is somewhat fractured this time, losing patience with each other and Adamsberg. Quirky yet competent, Adamsberg once again prevails to arrive at a conclusion that only he could envision. Recommended.