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  • Published: 1 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9780099569558
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $29.99

The Ghost Riders of Ordebec

A Commissaire Adamsberg novel




France’s bestselling crime writer, and three-time winner of the CWA International Dagger, sends the quirky and original Commissaire Adamsberg far outside his jurisdication in a chilling tale of evil-doers who disappear after visitations from a band of ghostly horsemen

‘People will die,’ says the panic-stricken woman outside police headquarters.

She refuses to speak to anyone besides Commissaire Adamsberg. Her daughter has seen a vision: ghostly horsemen who target the most nefarious characters in Normandy. Since the middle ages there have been stories of murderers, rapists, those with serious crimes on their conscience, meeting a grisly end following a visitation by the riders.

Soon after the young woman’s vision a notoriously vicious and cruel man disappears. Although the case is far outside his jurisdiction, Adamsberg agrees to investigate the strange happenings in a village terrorised by wild rumours and ancient feuds.

  • Published: 1 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9780099569558
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Fred Vargas

Fred Vargas was born in Paris in 1957. A historian and archaeologist by profession, she is now a bestselling novelist. Her books have sold over 10 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 45 languages.

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Praise for The Ghost Riders of Ordebec

Her novels about the kindly, quixotic Commissaire Adamsberg are unique, presenting us with a France that resembles Simenon’s in its concreteness but with a fantastical, even surreal, twist: werewolves, vampires and, in her latest novel, an army of ghosts on horseback… Her work is like a baked Camembert among the smorgasbord of chilly Scandinavian realism that dominates the foreign crime fiction market here, delicious comfort food for the sophisticated palate

Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph

This latest outing for the offbeat Commissaire Adamsberg is [Vargas'] best

Independent

An early contender for outstanding crime novel of the year

Sunday Times

After decades in which crime fiction in French was dominated by the Belgian author Georges Simenon, it has an indisputable new star in Fred Vargas

Joan Smith, Sunday Times

A celebration of love and camaraderie among the unlikeliest allies

Metro

Vargas depicts brilliantly a rural community riven with superstition, where class distinctions have existed for centuries

The Times

A glorious mix of myth, quirky observation and gallic humour

Sunday Telegraph

There are, it seems, two types of people: those who have discovered the quirky bliss of Fred Vargas's novels and those who don't know a good thing when they see it on the shelf

Independent on Sunday