In the Adamsberg series, Fred Vargas offers one of the most reliable in current crime fiction. This engaging, eccentric, early book offers an introduction to her ‘other’ detective, the retired Louis Kehlweiler, who shares digs with three young men (and a toad), all of them broke. It is refreshing to be reminded of Vargas’s day job as a physical anthropologist, as shown in Kehlweiler’s memorable discovery of a toe bone.