Se ha cometido un asesinato en los terrenos del Castillo de Valfeuillu, propiedad del conde de Trémorel. Dos cazadores furtivos han encontrado el cadáver de su esposa Berthe sumergido en un cañaveral. Mientras la policía local de Orcival está convencida de haber encontrado a los culpables y da por concluida su línea de investigación, llega un policía de la «Sûreté» de París que se hace cargo del caso. El astuto detective inicia su propia investigación, caracterizada por el constante uso del método deductivo, recolectando pruebas, estudiando exhaustivamente el escenario y las circunstancias del crimen, entrevistando a los testigos y analizando los posibles móviles de los sospechosos, en una atmósfera de creciente suspense... ( )

M. Lecoq is called in to solve the mystery of the murder of the Count and Countess of Tremorel. The Countess is found dead in the garden by a father-son duo poaching on the estate, and the Count has disappeared. He too is presumed dead. But is he? Lecoq will figure out the case.

I found the storytelling a bit confusing in this one because of the shifts in time. Lecoq didn’t really do much, either. He was more of a project-manager kind of detective, sending out his men to investigate things and synthesizing the evidence. Then the crime kind of solves itself. He seems to be a prototypical Sherlock Holmes, with his vast stores of knowledge, his irregulars, and his penchant for disguise.

I finished this book because it was on Serial Reader, but I would not likely have read it otherwise. ( )

The second outing of Monsieur Lecoq, this time to a small town on the borders of the Seine, where the comtesse de Trémorel has been found murdered. There's not much actual sleuthing going on, but the psychological portraits painted of the victim and her killer are very convincing. It would have been an easy read if here hadn't been so many typos and commas in the wrong place. I suspect this edition has been produced from a digitised version with sloppy OCR. Apart from this, very enjoyable.
ETC ( )