The Three Evangelists is an enormously entertaining departure from Vargas's Commissaire Adamsberg series. Sophia Simeonidis, a Greek opera singer, wakes up one morning to discover that a tree has appeared overnight in the garden of her Paris house. As her husband doesn't give a damn, she asks her new neighbours to dig around the tree to find out if something has been buried. Her neighbours are eccentric: Vandoosler, an ex-cop fired from the police for having helped a murderer to escape, and sharing the house are three impecunious historians: Mathias, Marc and Lucien - the three evangelists, as Vandoosler calls them. They accept the job because they are desperate for money and rather curious. When they find nothing and Sophia's dead body turns up weeks later, they decide to investigate.