A Climate of Fear: A Commissaire Adamsberg Mystery

An act of kindness by a stranger—mailing a letter dropped by an elderly woman who had collapsed on a Parisian street—sets off a chain of mysterious deaths marked with strange symbols and presumed to be suicides. Asked to investigate by an officer from another arrondissement who suspects murder, Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and his Serious Crime squad (last seen in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec) soon find links both to a tragic expedition to Iceland a decade earlier, in which two French tourists were killed, and a secret organization dedicated to reenacting the speeches of Maximilien Robespierre, one of the key figures during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. The unorthodox Adamsberg is stumped by this complex case, which he describes as a tangled knot of seaweed. But to unravel the puzzle, he must travel to the remote Icelandic island where the earlier deaths had occurred, said by locals to be home to a demon.