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Book Review of A Maigret Trio: Maigret's Failure / Maigret and the Lazy Burglar / Maigret in Society (Inspector Maigret, Bks 49, 56, 57)

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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 so subtle and overbred as to seem unreal. Most remarkable, perhaps, is Simenon's widely praised creation of the thief in MAIGRET AND THE LAZY BURGLAR, in which a risky profession is excercised by an eminently cautious man. The common thread to all three novellas is Simenon's astounding virtuosity and, of course, the inimitable Maigret.

"You get a picture of Paris-post WW2- equaled by no travel book, perhaps by no other writer of our time...Maigret could be as close as the thriller has come to literature since the time of Edgar Allan Poe" -Richard Growald UPI

George Simenon was one of the world's best selling authors. His most famous creation, Chief Inspector Jules Maigret, is featured in many of the author's novels as well as on the PBS series "Mystery!" Simenon died in 1989.