Maigret must wade through a media frenzy when news of a body found in a stove spreads across Paris. Who is the corpse, and how is the case connected to Madame Maigret?

A gruesome mystery has the whole of Paris agog: who is "the corpse in the stove"? The stove's owner, a reclusive Belgian bookbinder detained in the Santé prison, isn't saying. His ambitious young lawyer, meanwhile, keeps giving combative press interviews, stoking public fascination to a fever pitch. As Maigret and his team triage a flood of tip-offs, the case throws up a series of unexpected connections--even, bizarrely, to Madame Maigret. Plotted with a watchmaker's intricacy, Madame Maigret's Friend is a hypnotic journey through a city where everyone's lives are enmeshed, whether they realize it or not.