Judge's House (Penguin Books)

Exiled from Paris, Maigret discovers some disturbing secrets in a sleepy coastal town in this new translation, book twenty two in the new Penguin Maigret series. A short, sprightly man appeared in the doorway, looked left and right, and went back into the passage.

A moment later, the improbable happened. The little man reappeared, bent over, clinging to a long mass that he now started dragging through the mud. It must have been heavy. After four metres, he stopped to catch his breath.

The front door of the house had been left open. The sea was still twenty or thirty metres away. Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels in new translations. This novel has been published in a previous translation as Maigret in Exile.

"Compelling, remorseless, brilliant." (John Gray). "One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century...Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked aby his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories." (Guardian).

"A supreme writer...unforgettable vividness." (Independent). Georges Simenon was born in Liege, Belgium, in 1903.Best known in Britain as the author of the Maigret books, his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories have made him a household name in continental Europe.

He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.