Maigret's Holiday by Georges Simenon

I was lulled into thinking this was a relaxed mystery in the series, but Simenon collides the disparate clues into the stark confession of a calculating murderer that changed my mind.

Madame Maigret convalesces in the hospital after suffering an attack of appendicitis days into their summer holiday at Les Sables d'Olonne, leaving Maigret to wander the uneven cobblestone streets, listening to the sea break on the sand. Almost a fixture at the Brasserie de Remblai, he watches the afternoon card players, including the well-known Dr. Bellamy, who lives in the large house everyone admires.

Visiting the hospital every day, Maigret becomes interested in a patient next to Madame, a young woman in a coma after falling out of a moving car. She is Dr. Bellamy's sister-in-law. Days before the accident, Bellamy's beautiful wife Odette suffered a nervous breakdown and is no longer seen. The mystery shifts to the murder of a young girl who visited Odette, and her brother who ran off one night for a better life in Paris, leaving his parents a goodbye letter. Maigret aids the local Chief Inspector while asserting he is not in charge of the investigation. Well observed after days of walking the small town streets, Maigret is surprised how everyone is alert to his presence, answering questions before he even asks, as if they, not him, were the detectives.

Dr. Bellamy holds strict control over his wife, sometimes locking her in her room for her own good, but he cannot control the woman in the coma, who in wakeful moments before death, began to speak.

Each Maigret mystery has a different tone, and I readied myself for a quiet case in the sun, until the threads of Odette's breakdown, the woman in the coma, the murder of the girl, and the disappearing brother came together in an ingenious way I had not seen coming. I enjoyed tossing any solutions I may have come up with out the window, and this became one of my favorites in the series. Always original, told in a simple yet inviting way, Simenon's Maigret mysteries are always recommended.

1948 / Tradeback / 204 pages