Translated from the French by Eileen Ellenbogen.

The Inspector has fallen into disfavour with his Paris superiors and has been shunted to a district supervisor's job on the northern French coast. Here, among mussel-gatherers and lobstermen, Maigret suffers depression and boredom. He is an outsider. Even the local police inspector is dull and predictable, as everything in the coastal villages appears to be. But the discovery of a corpse in the house of a retired judge returns a sense of purpose to Maigret. The Boston Globe called this "one of Simenon's best Maigrets . . . replete with his customary irony and deft characterization."