This is the fourth of Fred Vargas’s crime thrillers to be published in English — the third, The Three Evangelists, won last year’s inaugural Duncan Lawrie Dagger for translated crime fiction. Vargas is the pseudonym of a French archaeologist and historian. Don’t let the ‘Fred’ mislead you about her gender.
Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands features Vargas’s series hero Commissaire Adamsberg, a Parisian detective who puts intuition above logic and evidence, and who blunders through his investigations with a blend of obstinacy and integrity. The novel opens with him in the grip of mysterious terrors. Eventually Adamsberg attributes his mental state to the news that a woman’s body has been discovered near Strasbourg. The victim has three neatly aligned stab wounds in her chest. A man has been charged with her murder. But Adamsberg is convinced that the killing is the work of the Trident, a psychopath who has murdered at least nine people since 1943, always with the same three-pronged weapon, and always framing another person for the crime.
Adamsberg believes that the Trident is the formidable Fulgence, an influential judge. In 1973, when Adamsberg was a junior police officer, his young brother was charged with one of the Trident’s murders; he perjured himself to save the boy from conviction. Over the years, he has painstakingly assembled evidence that throws suspicion on Fulgence. But the latest murder, so obviously part of the series, overturns everything and shows that the judge is even more powerful than he was before. Fulgence has been dead for 16 years and is apparently operating from beyond the grave.
It soon gets worse. Adamsberg’s superiors are not impressed with his obsession. A violent spat with a subordinate leads to a disciplinary inquiry. His private life is in chaos since he walked out on his girlfriend.
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