How good is Vargas? In July, The Chalk Circle Man won the International Dagger award for translated crime fiction from the Crime Writers' Association in the United Kingdom. The honor was the third for Vargas and her translator, Sian Reynolds, in the award's four years of existence.
As in Vargas' Have Mercy on Us All (2003), a series of odd messages triggers the mystery. In that novel, the messages were odd notes slipped into a modern-day town crier's news bulletins. Here they are visual: a series of mysterious chalk circles that appear in several Paris neighborhoods, each circle enclosing some odd object. Then, one night, a dead body, throat slashed, is found in one of the circles.
The very oddity of the circles lets the intuitive Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and the analytical Lt. Adrien Danglard consider any number of possible theories. I'll let you read the book to find out what Vargas makes of theories.
International crime-novel series are often translated out of order, occasionally at the cost of suspense. Readers are best advised to work their way through Jo Nesbø's excellent Norwegian police thrillers, for example, in order of original publication rather than of English translation.
For The Chalk Circle Man, Vargas' English-language publishers went back to the first Adamsberg mystery after earlier having issued books two, four, six, and seven (the eight books include six novels, one graphic novel, and a collection of novellas.)
This presents no continuity problems, however. Vargas' characters are like something out of a fairy tale - eternal opposites, ever-renewing archetypes despite their fresh adventures each time. That's why each novel's opening feels new.
