Maigret's Mistake (Inspector Maigret)

When a young woman is murdered, her recent exit from grim poverty may be the key to cracking the case—but Maigret, to his disquiet, struggles to spot the right suspect.

In an apartment in the exclusive Étoile district of Paris, the body of twenty-six-year-old Louise Filon is found. She’s been shot in the head at close range. Maigret, arriving on the disturbing scene, questions her housekeeper and the building’s concierge. Despite an intuition that neither woman is giving him the full picture, he learns two facts of note: that Louise grew up in poverty and that she had two lovers, a penniless musician and a wealthy man who paid her bills. A love triangle, a crime of passion, seems the obvious line of investigation—and yet Maigret balks: he knows that applying a familiar template to the infinities of human nature can often lead an investigation astray. With exquisite psychological precision, Georges Simenon sets the inspector on a course that has him, and readers, second-guessing their every instinct as he orchestrates a whodunit like no other in Maigret’s Mistake.