Despite enjoying a few standalone titles by Belgian minimalist Georges Simenon — thanks in no small part to the Orion Crime Masterworks series — I was left rather ambivalent by my first encounter with Inspector Jules Maigret in The Late Monsieur Gallet (1931). A recent comment on that post, however, directed me to a few titles which might be to my liking, and so here we are with Maigret Sets a Trap (1955), the forty-eighth of seventy-five books featuring the character. A serial killer has already murdered five women in the same Paris arrondissement, and while much of what follows feels very familiar, you also have to wonder if it was Simenon who established a pattern that others would so intently adhere to in the decades ahead.