Shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger 2011.
When a pile of shoes containing severed feet are found outside Highgate cemetery just as Commissaire Adamsberg leaves Paris for a conference in London he's in the firing line alongside his colleagues from New Scotland Yard like never before. This macabre and brutal case together with one equally disturbing one back in Paris that greets Adamsberg on his return leads him on a global hunt that is completely addictive.
CWA Judges’ comments: ‘As usual in Vargas’s weird and wonderful world, disparate crimes in hundred-year-old London, contemporary Paris and the Serbia of legend. In the eccentric and intuitive Adamsberg’s seventh outing, maverick cop and his maverick team plunge into adventures which follow from unusual events.’
Three-times winner of the CWA International Dagger for Crime Fiction Commissaire Adamsberg has left Paris for a police conference in London, accompanied by anglophile Commandant Danglard and Estalere, a young sergeant. The city offers a welcome change of scenery until a gruesome discovery is made - just outside the gates of Highgate Cemetery a pile of shoes, all containing severed feet, is found. Returning to Paris, the three men are then confronted with the violent killing and dismemberment of a wealthy, elderly man. Both the dead man's son and gardener have motives for murder, but soon another candidate for the killing emerges. As Adamsberg investigates the links between these two unsettling crimes, he puts himself at terrible risk.
