The Hatter's Ghost | 
pickSimenon's psychological portrait of a serial killer is compelling and creepy, with the things unsaid somehow worse than the things he shows - less is definitely more!
The Strangler is garotting older women, the hapless police have no clue, an anxious tailor suspects his neighbour but with no substantial evidence cannot claim the reward for information, and a young reporter's theorising incites the killer to write that he is not insane, that his ⬇️
"He would buy books in the salerooms...choosing them at random. They were invariably books with yellowed pages, about which there clung a special smell, and he would find in them sometimes a pressed flower, at others a squashed fly. Occasionally, he would come across a letter in faded ink which had served as a marker, and it was seldom that there was not some name inscribed on the front page, or the purple stamp of a public library." ?
My first #BookHaul of the day was from Crook Hall Gardens, a National Trust property a few minutes walk from Durham town centre. It's a beautiful, tranquil oasis, with a reasonable selection of secondhand books in the Jacobian Room. I assume the statue is of Pomona, as she's holding a fruit & facing a small orchard.
Books are: a probably somewhat dated text book on working with post-traumatic stress experience, a 1942 Faber collection of Eliot, ⬇️
pickThe Hatter and the tailor live directly across from each other in a little French town , with only a ‘trench ‘ like space between them. They see intimately into each others lives. I loved reading the details of their everyday. Here it has been raining since the first body was discovered, now five more bodies have been found in La Rochelle.
Brilliantly told, we enter the unravelling mind of the killer. A page turner for me.
Simenon's unfolding of the motives and character of the murderer are handled with an expertise to be expected of a master mystery writer 4.5 🎩 2mo