A new translation of this haunting tale about the lengths to which people will go to escape from guilt, part of the Maigret series

A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And hanging was the leitmotif of at least twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches.On the edge of a forest- a man hanging from every branch.A church steeple- beneath the rooster atop the weather vane, a human body dangled from each arm of the cross … below another sketch were written four lines from Villon’s Ballade des Pendus.On a trip to Brussels, Maigret unwittingly causes a man’s suicide, but his own remorse is overshadowed by the discovery of the sordid events that drove the desperate man to shoot himself.