Customer Reviews

Seeking Whom He May Devour: Chief Inspector Adamsberg Investigates (Chief Inspector Adamsberg Mysteries)

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Seeking Whom He May Devour (French 1999, English 2004) is set in the French Alps. The villagers at first believe a rogue wolf is responsible for some sheep savagings, but when a woman is killed in the same manner, rumors of a werewolf begin to circulate. Soliman, the woman's young adopted son, Watchee, her ancient head shepherd, and Camille, a young musician recruited to drive the sheep lorry, head out in pursuit of a loner who disappears immediately after the murder. When the trio realize they are in over their heads, Camille contacts her old friend Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg for assistance. The solution of the mystery is clever and unexpected, but the true charm of this book is the eccentric road trip which brings together four vivid and unique personalities: Soliman creates fables to explain reality, Camille reads The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft for relaxation, Watchee lives and breathes sheep, and Adamsberg floats in a cloud of intuition, waiting for the facts to settle into an understandable pattern.
http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/V_Authors/Vargas_Fred.html

In the Southern Alps-Maritimes section of France, four sheep are killed at Ventebrune; nine at Pierrefort. The locals insist it is the brutal work of a feral pack of wolves led by a gigantic beast like none ever seen before. They believe this beast will turn to devouring humans soon.

At Les Ecart five sheep belonging to Suzanne Rosselin are killed and three others badly wounded. Canadian Lawrence Johnstone works with wolves at the Mercantour National Park; he investigates the sheep killings and knows Suzanne through his live-in lover Camille. Suzanne accuses hermit-like Monsieur Massart of being a werewolf, but she dies when the giant beast attacks her. Johnstone thinks Suzanne was close to the truth, but Massart is not a supernatural creature, but has trained a wolf to do his killings. The local police still believe a large wolf is the culprit while everyone else concurs with the late Suzanne's theory of a werewolf on the prowl. As other people die, Commisaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg begins his inquiry though he is unhappy that his former lover Camille is here with the Canadian. He scans the police reports until he finds a clue that makes him believe he knows exactly what is happening.

SEEKING WHOM HE MAY DEVOUR is a fantastic French police procedural starring an intelligent eccentric commissaire and a delightful support cast though support is a loose term in this superior thriller as Jean-Baptiste enters the fray later than usual for a hero. That will not matter as readers will join the locals debating who or what is the killer, wolves, werewolf, or human predator. Fred Vargas provides a tense gripping tale that readers will fully appreciate from start to finish.

Harriet Klausner

I grew up enamored with sophisticated detective stories of British origin and loving the blunt crime stories styled by American authors. Now, I am engrossed by the settings and character of recent European crime fiction.

I am captivated by the historical details of Reverte, the peculiarities of several Scandinavian sleuths, the landscapes and approaches of various Italian procedurals and the whole foreign, make that alien, mental terrain being laid out before me.

Another reviewer has outlined the plot and described the characters of this work. Thankfully, I didn't read much about it, because it was such a delight to be brought into the story by this brilliant author. Ms. Vargas is masterful in her evocation of the people and places, fears and superstitions of the French Maritime Alps. She is equally adept at moving the plot along, devising events to keep the reader off-balance, alert and eager to learn if his deductions are conclusive. Even more, her use of language (wonderfully translated) crafts dazzling phrases, passages and paragraphs that make the scents and sights of the crimes, the discomforts of the setting and the psychology of the characters almost transcend this medium.

About three quarters of the way through the book, I decided I had fallen in love with Ms. Vargas. My one fear, as the story developed, was that the tale would reach a silly or simplistic finale. I was torn between avoiding the finish or hurrying to it like an on-line correspondent looking to meet an email-mate. Fear not, she finished with a flourish that reinforced my romance.

Forgive me for cutting this short, but I have come late to the work of Fred Vargas and I have other novels to discover.

Actually, I have already set about filling in the past of Chief Inspector Adamsberg, but I felt I had to share my enlightenment. As I said, I came late to the work of Ms. Vargas. Please, don't make that mistake.

Fred Vargas is my favorite new find. She writes intelligently about interesting characters. With the Euro at such crazy rates, I can only afford to go to Europe in books, and this series gives a great sense of France.

This is the second of a 9-part series of police procedurals about Paris police commissioner Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg J-BA), who hails from the Pyrenees. In France, regional pride matters and so does rivalry between police and the gendarmerie. Anyone from Paris investigating regional crime faces a degree of hostility and indifference from local law enforcement. But J-BA is a demure, hardly visible 1.71m tall investigator, who shares information, asks lots of questions. He is not pushy or barking orders. And most of his provincial colleagues, aware of his reputation and record, are helpful.
This thriller starts in the French Alps when sheep are found dead, their throats crushed and eaten by what? A pack of wolves (the region has 40 of them, carefully monitored by e.g. the Canadian guest researcher Lawrence), or by a single wolf with huge jaws? When Suzanne, a sheep farmer, is found dead with identical wounds, ancient stories about werewolves re-emerge. All gossip points to a lone male who returned six years earlier after 20 years of absence, who works as a butcher in the region's abattoir. And he is missing. A map is found in his mountain shack with thin crosses confirming with the sites of wolf attacks, and a trail of country roads leading to Manchester, UK, where he is rumored to have a relative. His Great Dane dog, climbing equipment, car and cash are also missing...
How this evolves is for readers to discover. J-BA and his muse Camille also meet again. Good police procedural. Good atmosphere. Nice characters. Nice book. Great series!

First Line: On Tuesday, four sheep were killed at Ventebrune in the French Alps.

A small mountain village in the French Alps awakens each morning to the grisly sight of yet more sheep with their throats torn out. A local insists that it's the work of a werewolf, and when she is found killed in the same manner, people begin to wonder if she was right.

Soon an unlikely little group forms of the murdered woman's son, one of her shepherds, and her friend Camille. They've decided that a local eccentric named Massart is the werewolf, and since he's nowhere to be seen, they're going to find his trail and catch him. On their comedy-of-errors road trip, it doesn't take them long to realize that they just don't have what it takes to apprehend a werewolf, and Camille summons Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg to help them. Adamsberg finds that there are many layers of buried secrets for his intuition to unravel.

Adamsberg has been compared to Maigret, and I can't help but chuckle at his choice of venue for deep thinking:

"The Waters of Liffey provided a first-rate solution to his dilemma. The only people in the bar were noisy, boozy Irishmen speaking what was for Adamsberg a completely hermetic tongue. He thought he must be one of the last people left on the planet to know not a single word of English. Such old-fashioned ignorance allowed him to fit happily into the Liffey, where he could enjoy the stream of life without being in any way inconvenienced by it. In this precious hidey-hole Adamsberg spent many an hour dreaming away, peacefully waiting for ideas to rise to the surface if his mind."


The stars of Seeking Whom He May Devour are, without doubt, the wonderful cast of characters and the eerie, creepy atmosphere high in the mountains with few people around. Vargas came close a time or two to getting me to believe in werewolves.

As much as I enjoyed the characters and the atmospheric setting, I did find the plot to be a bit of a letdown. When one of the characters was described, I knew that person was the killer immediately. If I hadn't known this so quickly, I think Vargas would have had the hair standing on the back of my neck. I missed that element of suspense in what was otherwise a very good book.

I happened to read this book in the series out of order, skipping from the first book to the third. Vargas provided just enough backstory to keep me grounded without bogging down the plot.

Fred Vargas (the pen name for french archaeologist Frederique Auduoin-Rouzeau) writes with a flare for chaos and the ability to create dramatic characters, each with their own quirks. Just beginning to read a dialogue between two of her characters and you can immediately tell who they are by their sentence and thought structure. This in itself is amazing when you take into account that there are seven or eight main characters and three or four minor ones who add much to the story. Whereas her descriptive narrative is strong, she never over does it like Conan Doyle or McBain, she always makes her point.

In this novel (the second in the series and the second published in English) may confuse some readers in that it refers to the original book that is the fifth to be published. The first published "Have Mercy on us All" was the third written. This can make this book difficult to understand because of the relationship between Camille and Adamsberg established in the first book. The original book had a title that doesn't translate directly into English and is something like, "The Man who was upside-down or The Man who was inside-out" but only makes sense after you finish this book. Again, it sits well with the quirkiness of Vargas and her books. As and aside, Adamsberg who is a "Commissaire" from the beginning, is referred to as a "Chief Inspector" on the covers of the first two books of the series (in both French and English).

Adamsberg, who is supposed to be the main character of the series, doesn't appear until the middle of this novel, and it is his "amorata" who is front and center in the first half. In fact Camille (who is a free spirit to make free spirits nervous) is truly the story in this story. We are given more background about her in this book than in the first two and her personality really comes to the for. Adamsberg is himself an 'odd one' from the Pyrennes which is french siberia) and a Commissaire in the French police in Paris, but ends up all over France for one reason or another. He is one of the few French detectives who is respected by both the police and the gendarmarie, and is something of a legend for his "zen-like" style of detection.

It would be worthless to try to describe the plot, except to say that there is a "wolf" "werewolf" or both hunting people and sheep in southeast France and no one has any idea as to who or why this is happening. Enter our two friends and some of Vargas' uniquely styled secondary characters. Enjoy.

Zeb Kantrowitz

Fred Vargas' "Have Mercy on us All" got me hooked on her Columbo-esque detective, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. This outing concentrates more with his sometime lover, Camille, who we catch up with in the sheeprearing country of les Alpes de Haute Provence. She has joined her new partner, a Canadian filming a documentary on wolves that have made their way out of the wild and are presumed to be savaging the sheep population, but when humans start dying, superstitions are raised that a werewolf is responsible. Throw in an ill-conceived road trip with three of the most unlikely participants ever to share the cab of a lorry who soon discover they are way out of their depth and call on Adamsberg for his intuitive assistance. The book jacket has outlined the above more or less, and has blurbs using such adjectives as "creepy" and "atmospheric." What the blurbs don't tell you is how laugh out loud hilarious this book is in parts, much funnier and lighter in tone than "Have Mercy on us All" and what a satisfying conclusion it has. The backstory is better than those in most series, and I look forward to reading more of Vargas soon.

First Sentence: On Tuesday, four sheep were killed at Ventebrune in the French Alps.

Camille is a composer and plumber living in a small French Alp village where sheep are being killer by an unseen beast. The murder of a townswoman raises suspicion of a werewolf. Residents begin to suspect Massart, a loner who came to the area 20 year ago and has now disappeared. The woman's adopted son and an old shepherd convince Camille to be their driver as they search for Massat. When they find the search impossible on their own, they wish for a very special policeman. Camille, reluctantly, calls upon her former lover, Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsburg, for help.

One of the first things I look for in a book is the characters. For me, they must be well conveyed, strong, unique and, yes, I must be able to, if not like, at least empathize with them. Vargas creates just such characters and it is they who drive the story. I was delighted that we get to know Camille in this book as she was previously, something of a mystery herself. The residents of the village, Suzanne, and particularly the old shepherd and Solomon, with home Camille ventures forth, are wonderfully created with affection, humor. There is also great poignancy to the relationship, particularly with the inclusion of Adamsburgh into the traveling trio.

And humor there is, but the wry, dry humor of the author's voice. Vargas has a wonderful voice. I love her imagery and descriptions, particularly in the opening when she anthropomorphizes the wolves. She brings the story, location and people to life.

If there is a weakness, it is in the plot but only because the characters are so strong. However, I found the further I progressed into the story, the more intrigued I was by the mystery. I knew the killer is not a werewolf; the story is not horror or fantasy. I did suspect the villain but appreciated that being given details as to the motive behind the crimes as well as uncovering the killer. There is also a second thread to the story which adds suspense.

There is no question I have become a Vargas fan. I highly recommend giving her a try but start with either her standalone "The Three Evangelists," or "The Chalk Circle Man," the first book in the Adamsberg series.

SEEKING WHOM HE MAY DEVOUR (Pol Proc-Comm. Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg-France-Cont) - VG+
Vargas, Fred - 3rd in series
Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, ©1999, Trade Paperback - ISBN: 9780743284028

After reading The Chalk Circle Man, I was hungry for another Chief Inspector Adamsberg mystery.

This book shows the inspector as dreamy and illogical as ever. How he gets lured out of Paris to the French Alps to join a manhunt for a werewolf is a complicated story. The fact that a crazy redhead is trying to assassinate him provides some motivation to leave Paris. So does the fact that he's spotted Camille, the runaway love of his life, in a TV news story.

Camille seems to have settled in a remote area where sheep are being savaged by a wolf of abnormal size. Some superstitious locals believe it's the work of a werewolf, especially when the creature starts killing people.

Through a convoluted train of events, Adamsberg joins a motley crew in a lorry stinking of sheep to hunt down the big bad wolf, now assumed to have a human master (a surly local who has mysteriously disappeared). Camille is driving the lorry. She's a wonderful combination of the eternal feminine and a masculine mind obsessed with tools. Also on board are Watchee, an ancient shepherd who never sleeps, and a young black man whose adopted mother was killed by the man-wolf.

To add to the confusion, Camille is having an affair with a tall blond muscular Canadian, a specialist in grizzly bears. The guy is hot - a formidable rival for the short, unglamorous Adamsberg.

No review can possibly do justice to the bizarre happenings and quirky characters in this story. Better to read the book.

Don't be put off by the rather pretentious title. The much better French title was L'Homme à l'envers, which I think means Inside-out Man. In the hinterlands of France, werewolves are thought to be hairless in their human form. If you cut them open, you'd find their wolf hair under the skin.