"He was wearing a dark suit, a beige raincoat and on his feet, which were twisted at an odd angle, he wore yellow-brown shoes, which seemed out of keeping with a day as colourless as this. Apart from his shoes he looked so ordinary that he would have passed completely unnoticed on the street or on one of the numerous cafU terraces on the boulevard. When Maigret discovers an unexpectedly flamboyant detail about an otherwise unremarkable man, the inspector...

Maigret is called to the home of professional gambler, Felix Nahour, who has been found shot dead by his chambermaid. Maigret is shocked to recognise a photo of the man's wife who becomes the main suspect. All signs point to her guilt but Maigret suspects there might be more to this complicated affair.

Emile Jovis leaves the old apartment in the rue des Francs-Bourgeois where he has lived for years, to settle, with his family, in Clairevie, a modern housing estate in the suburbs. From this new installation, Jovis promises a lot of happiness. Soon, it must be agreed that Clairevie, where everyone isolates himself in anonymity, hardly replaces his old district of Paris. But Jovis made, thanks to a poorly soundproofed partition, a singular discovery....

In this trio of novels, Inspector Jules Maigret is faced with three very different deaths and, correspondingly, three very different milieus, each depicted with Simenon's characteristic sureness of touch. In "Maigret's Failure," the vulgarly rich owner of a chain of butcher shops, "The King of the Meat Trade, " is murdered for motives both understandable and obvious. In "Maigret in Society," on the other hand, the inspector confronts a cast of characters...

On his travels through the U.S., Maigret stops in Tucson, Arizona at the guidance of his FBI friend Harry Cole, who leaves him one day to observe a coroners inquest. The body being examined is that of Bessie Mitchell, a young girl who died under suspicious circumstances-- she spent a night drinking and driving with five young Air Force men and was found the next morning on the tracks, run over by a train. Maigret quickly becomes engrossed in the hearing...

Inspector Maigret is followed home one evening by a man who reveals his intention to kill his wife and her lover. Maigret intervenes and speaks to the man daily but when the calls suddenly stop Maigret finds a murder on his hands.

"Maigret's peaceful retirement in the country is interrupted when his nephew comes to him for help after being implicated in a crime he didn't commit. Soon Maigret is back in the heart of Paris, and out of place in a once-familiar world"--Page 4 of cover.

Maigret goes up against a group of American gangsters and finds he just might have met his match. The thirty-ninth book in the new Penguin Maigret series. In Maigret's latest adventure, the Inspector learns that his hapless colleague Lognon is being menaced by some notorious American mobsters, and he makes it his mission to bring them to justice, despite threatening warnings that he is out of his depth. As the stakes get higher, Maigret must rely...

"He opened the door for her and watched her walk away down the huge corridor, then hesitate at the top of the stairs. Heads turned as she passed. You sensed she came from a different world, the world of the night, and there was something almost indecent about her in the harsh light of a winter's day." A young cabaret dancer in a black silk dress leads Inspector Maigret into a seamy world of nightclubs, drug addiction and exploitation on the streets...