Maigret is tasked with investigating the murder of an aristocratic former ambassador, and finds himself immersed in a new and unfamiliar part of Parisian society. Each time he takes on a new case, Inspector Maigret passes "through a more or less lengthy period of hesitation, unease, even timidity" as he tries to grasp "an unfamiliar context, a house, a way of life, people who had their habits, their ways of thinking and expressing themselves." Some milieus are easier to understand than others, and when the murder of a retired ambassador with no apparent enemies thrusts Maigret into the society of fin de siècle aristocrats, the detective finds himself flummoxed and infuriated. With no leads to speak of, Maigret finds himself up against the niceties of the nobility and their servants, who seem more concerned with protecting a dead man's private life than helping the police catch his murderer, as he wrestles with his own feelings of resentment toward their rarefied world. Full of twists, turns, and characters "sprung from the pages of a turnofthe-century novel," Maigret and the Old People is a beguiling mystery and a dazzling composite of two very different eras of literary Paris.