Oops, I nearly forgot to review this book… Not the book altogether, because the plot and the images were engrossing and satisfying, but it added to the now respectable number of Fred Vargas books I enjoyed, so I was tempted to dismiss it as “just one more”.

Fred Vargas likes to use old mythologies into contemporary mysteries. The story I like best from her (to this day), is “Have Mercy on Us All”, about the old fear of the plague, linking the epidemic of “Black death” from Middle-Ages to the modern alerts on new viruses. This mystery recycles the old myth of the werewolf. Vargas is obviously a history buff and refers to the historical incident of the Beast of Gevaudan, when in mid-18th century a remote French countryside was terrorized by some creature that many believed to be a werewolf, or at least a wolf of a gigantic size.

I didn’t approach Fred Vargas’ mysteries in order, but it wasn’t a problem. We find Commissaire Adamsberg once again, the dreamy, quirky police chief inspector whose intuition comes on in leaps and bounds rather than step by step. A nice addition to the plot is his former girlfriend Camille, a musician (composer for movies) who moonlights as a plumber (or maybe the other way round). Apparently there has been a complicated story between them both, but I guess with such a couple, relationships can’t be easy. Long after they separated, she has retired (with a new, Canadian boyfriend) in a remote village of the Mercantour region in the French Alps, a natural park where (a few) Italian wolves still live nowadays.

Jumping from 18C Gevaudan to 21C Mercantour is not so difficult. Every summer, French farmers grumble against wolves who attack their herds (grumbling is a national sport when going on strike isn’t available) and urge the government to stop the reintroduction of wolves as natural species in the French country parks. In Vargas book, the killing of an eccentric sheep breeder by a gigantic wolf unleashes the anger and paranoia of people from Mercantour. Camille, a friend of the victim, sets off to find the killer together with a few other quirky characters, all convinced that a werewolf is involved, what people used to call a man inside-out (as the French title goes), a man who by day wears his wolf skin inside and by night becomes a wolf.

I won’t tell any more of the plot. As always, the resolution is the weakest part in Vargas mysteries, but I had fun all the way. I never visited Mercantour but now I’d like to! And the good news is, this year mountains are our summer destination, crossing from Bourgogne to Austrian Tyrol through Switzerland. I hope we won’t see any (were)wolf though!