How Adamsberg thinks

I am in the process of reading SEEKING WHOM HE MAY DEVOUR by Fred Vargas.

I'm fascinated by the descriptions of the thought processes of Vargas' protagonist Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg.

Commissaire Adamsberg liked solitude, he liked to let his mind wander far out to sea, but he also liked people and the movement of people, and he fed on their presence around him like a flea... Adamsberg spent many an hour dreaming away, peacefully waiting for ideas to rise to the surface of his mind.
For that is how Adamsberg found his ideas - simply by waiting for them to turn up. When one rose before his eyes like a dead fish on the crest of a wave, he picked it up, turned it over, asked himself whether he needed this item at the moment, whether it was of any interest. Adamsberg never thought actively, he found it quite sufficient to day-dream and then to sort his catch, like a fisherman scrabbling about clumsily in the bottom of the net and finally picking the prawn out of the mess of sand, seaweed, pebbles and shells. Adamsberg's thoughts contained plenty of seaweed and sand, and he didn't always know how to avoid getting caught in the mess. He needed to jettison a lot of it, evacuate great heaps. He was aware that his own mind produced a mixed bag of mental items of uneven size and value, and that things did not necessarily happen the same way for other people. He had noticed the difference between his thinking and the mental products of Danglard, his number two, was identical to the difference between a netful from the river-bed and a fishmonger's neatly laid-out slab. He couldn't help it. Anyway, he always ended up fishing something useful out of his glory-hole, as long as people gave him enough time. That's how Adamsberg used his brain, like an ocean that you could trust entirely to feed you well, but which you've long ago given up trying to tame.

And then ten or so pages further on, we see it from Danglard's point of view:
Danglard had never grasped the peculiar logic that lay behind Adamsberg's decisions. In his view, of course, it was no logic at all, just an unending kaleidoscope of hunches and surmises which inexplicably gave rise to undeniably first-rate results. That said, Danglard's nerves could not stand the strain of keeping in step with Adamsberg's thought processes. For not only were the commissaire's thoughts of indeterminate substance, hovering between the solid, liquid and gaseous states, but they were forever aggluntinating with other thoughts without the slightest rational link. So while Danglard with his well-honed mind sorted the sheep from the goats, put things in little boxes, found the missing links, and thereby solved problems with method, Adamsberg put one thing with another, or turned them upside down, or scattered what had been brought together and threw it up in the air to see where it would fall. And despite his amazingly slow pace, he would, in the end, extract truth from that chaos. ... he remained torn between finding Adamsberg's mind admirable, and finding it exasperating.

This is just wonderful writing and I look forward to learning more about Adamsberg's methods.
This is the first Fred Vargas novel I have tackled, and I can see already that I have a great treat in store.