Blue chalk circles are popping up all around the streets of Paris— containing such disparate and banal street treasures as a beer can, a trombone, a broken egg, and a doll's head—and Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg seems alone in finding the bizarre phenomenon ominous rather than amusing. His sense of foreboding proves prescient when a woman's lifeless body is found encircled in the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, and Adamsberg knows more victims are in store. Featuring a rich cast of eccentric characters, this witty mystery from (female) French author Fred Vargas is wildly inventive.