This Night's Foul Work
Fred Vargas

This is the first of this series featuring a quirky French inspector and his colorful squad of detective that I had come across. I enjoyed it and was willing to suspend my disbelief enough to swallow the preposterous plot.
The squad is headed by the rather morose and dreamy Commissioner Adamsberg who relies on instinct and inspiration rather than the plodding footwork, lengthy interrogations and forensics favored by his illustrious forebear Inspector Maigret. At one crucial point in this story, he sets loose a fat and lazy cat to track down a colleague whom he believes has been abducted and is in mortal danger. The cat travels 38 kilometers across Paris while a police helicopter hovers overhead. Its completely ridiculous -- but fun.
Other characters include a lieutenant who speaks in verse (alexandrines in the style of Racine), a collection of taciturn peasants from Normandy, an archeologist who can tell from digging what kind of spade was used to dig a hole and whether the person digging it was a man or a woman. There's also a priest who has lost his faith and who presides over a 14th century manuscript that contains the secret of eternal life that lies at the center of the plot.
Unlike Maigret, Adamsberg is rather indifferent to Gallic cuisine and fine wine. So one doesn't get the vicarious enjoyment of wonderful meals in a pleasant alcoholic haze.
Instead, one gets an education in ephemera. I learned much from this book including the fact that most mammels have bones in their penises and that some also have bones in their hearts. I learned about the decomposition process and the way hair grows after death. Hair is known as "the quick" because it keeps growing after life has fled, hence the phrase, "the quick and the dead." By the time the book ended, I was caught up in the author's spell, less interested in the identity of the serial killer and how he/she would be caught than in the wealth of minutiae accompanying the story.