A quiet, unobtrusive man, Raymond Auger, has spent the entire day, 16 hours, sitting in the Café des Ministères, on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue des Saints-Pères. Joseph, the waiter, had gotten so upset that he'd even called Janvier, to whose sister-in-law he was married, to come and check him out. When he finally left, a few seconds later a shot rang out, and a man was found dead outside the café... but it wasn't him. Maigret starts his investigation with the café directly across the street, Chez Léon, and in fact the dead man had spent most of the day there. A little further along, Maigret finds the restaurant, À l'Escargot, where the woman who seemingly brought something to Auger in the Café des Ministères had waited and eaten. A train ticket in the pocket of the dead man, Ernest Combarieu, leads Maigret and Janvier to Juvisy, where it is a simple matter to locate the hotel Combarieu had been staying in, and the home of the Augers. Isabelle Auger is quick to admit she shot Combarieu, who she claimed was about to shoot her husband. Or was it? Her identical twin, Marthe Combarieu, who had died two years earlier, had been married to Combarieu, who claimed, when he returned from Gabon, that in fact, Isabelle was Marthe...
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The review of this Book prepared by Dana Samson
