‘Compelling, remorseless, brilliant’ John Gray

It wasn’t a traditional painter’s smock that Madam Jonker was wearing. It was more a Dominican’s monk’s habit, the fabric as thick and soft as a bathrobe…She was holding a palette in her left hand, a brush in her right, and her black eyes lighted on Maigret with curiosity.

During an undercover case Inspector Lognon is shot in a room he was sharing with a beautiful woman who has since disappeared. Inspector Maigret retraces Lognon’s secretive last few days and is drawn into the darker side of the art world.

Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels in new translations. This novel has been published in a previous translation as Maigret and the Apparition.

‘His artistry is supreme’ John Banville

‘One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories’ Guardian

Read a sample here