Fred Vargas Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand

Fred Vargas

Penguin, Aug 2007, $14.00

ISBN: 9780143112167

Police Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and several of his Paris Serious Crime Squad members are going to frozen Quebec for a course on using DNA technology. However Adamsberg is preoccupied with a recent newspaper account reporting the stabbing death of a woman with three cuts; the case reminds him of eight previous homicides spread across France between 1949 and 1983; all solved with eight culprits including Adamsburg's brother caught. Still the prime suspect in the mind of Adamsberg's gut for all eight remains his childhood crony Judge Fulgence, who died a few years ago. However he ponders how the serial killer returned from the grave to commit the latest homicide. Adamsberg discuses the murders with other cops, but all point out the obvious to him that Fulgence is dead.

The trainees arrive in Quebec where, in spite of the cold weather, Adamsberg walks and talks to himself for miles; on his trek he meets an eccentric French woman with whom he shares a tryst. Soon afterward, he learns the woman was stabbed to death and he is the prime suspect. He knows the late Judge followed him to Canada and killed her, but how to prove a dead man committed murder while the DNA affirms Adamsberg was with the victim.

Readers and some police cronies will wonder if Adamsberg has finally gone over the edge as he feels some guilt over the woman's death, but also wonders if he did the crime because he blacked out just like others before him when they were accused of murders dating back to 1949. His peers want to believe in him, but blaming a dead man is hard to accept as rationale thinking especially with family connection. Readers will enjoy Adamsburg's later caper as he assumes that his arch enemy the devilish Fulgence somehow always escapes, but this time has set up the Commissaire as the latest culprit.

Harriet Klausner