The Circle Game

Book 4, The Circle Game. Maigret, newly arrived in England, is given an appointment as a detective by his mentor, Lord Belmont, much to the disgust of those he has to work with. Being thrown a ‘bone’ (a seemingly hysterical nurse in training thinks her friends, university students, are being murdered) intended to make a mockery of him, results in the unraveling of a gruesome series of cold-blooded murders and though the perpetrators are caught they cannot be prosecuted. By the time Maigret gets the case the murders are over and with only one possible suspect the problem becomes how to prove him responsible. In this story Maigret meets his nemesis, who, after The Tattoos, where he is met again, plays an incidental part in other stories and influences some of Maigret’s decisions; also, he meets the reporter, Eugene Lapole, who ends up writing accounts of his cases for The Daily Post newspaper.