A beautiful young woman is found murdered in a passageway of the Notre-Dame de Paris. Police investigators and priests search for the killer as they discover other truths about guilt and redemption.

Keeping watch under the windows of the Paris flat belonging to a politician's nephew, Louis Kehlweiler catches sight of something odd on the pavement. A small white object, surrounded by the excrement of local dogs. A piece of bone. Human bone, in fact. Naturally, when Kehlweiler takes his find to the nearest police station, he faces ridicule. But the tiny fragment obsesses him so much that he stops shadowing suspicious characters in Paris and follows...

Parisian policewoman Capucine LeTellier plunges into a uniquely Parisian affair of gastronomic delights and bureaucratic intrigue to close a case that could make her career... or kill it...

Visiting a prisoner to inform him that his reprieve has been denied and that his execution is scheduled for the next day, Inspector Maigret listens to the condemned man's story, undertaking a personal investigation that leads him to the Guinguette à Deux Sous, a bar by the Seine, and into the seamy underbelly of bourgeois Paris.--

"Proud, eccentric, and antisocial, Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon) has always kept to himself. But after a woman turns up dead in the Paris suburb where he lives, he feels drawn to a pretty young newcomer to town (Viviane Romance). [He] discovers that his neighbors are only too ready to suspect the worst of him, and is framed for the murder. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon, Julien Duvivier's first film after his return to France from Hollywood finds...