The Judge's House (Maigret, #22)

Exiled from Paris, Maigret discovers some disturbing secrets in a sleepy coastal town in this new translation, book twentytwo 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.