The man on the boulevard - Georges Simenon

Madame Thouret had no trouble identifying her husband's body. What puzzled her was that he was wearing light brown shoes and a garish tie she'd never seen before. Maigret masterfully reconstructs the secret life of a vulnerable man who has made a desperate attempt to evade the failure and isolation of his rigidly conventional life.'A truly wonderful writer ... marvellously readable - lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates of run-down hotels, cold, dark barges, quaysidecanal-taverns, lurking prostitutes, pot-bellied burghers, taciturn youths, slippery barmen' Muriel Spark, Sunday Times