Somewhere out there, in the darkness, a black wolf is feeding.
Several weeks ago, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team uncovered and stopped a domestic terrorist attack in Montréal, arresting the person behind it. A man they called the Black Wolf.
But their relief is short-lived. In a sickening turn of events, Gamache has realized that plot, as horrific as it was, was just the beginning. Perhaps even a deliberate misdirection. One he fell into. Something deeper and darker, more damaging, is planned. Did he in fact arrest the Black Wolf, or are they still out there? Armand is appalled to think his mistake has allowed their conspiracy to grow, to gather supporters. To spread lies, manufacture enemies, and feed hatred and division.
Still recovering from wounds received in stopping the first attack, Armand is confined to the village of Three Pines, leading a covert investigation from there. He must be careful not to let the Black Wolf know he has recognized his mistake. In a quiet church basement, he and his senior agents Beauvoir and Lacoste, pore over what little evidence they have. Two notebooks. A few mysterious numbers on a tattered map of Québec. And a phrase repeated by the person they had called the Grey Wolf. A warning…
In a dry and parched land where there is no water.
Gamache and his small team of supporters realize that for the Black Wolf to have gotten this far, they must have powerful allies, in law enforcement, in industry, in organized crime, in the halls of government.
From the apparent peace of his little village, Gamache finds himself playing a lethal game of cat and mouse with an invisible foe who is gathering forces and preparing to strike.

My Review:

This book begins in the exact same place where the previous book, The Grey Wolf, ends. With the same characters, even with the same sentence, at the moment in time where the situation changes irrevocably. The moment, as artist Clara Morrow’s current series of paintings is currently stuck on, the moment just before something happened.

It begins in the village of Three Pines, in the Gamache living room, where the Sûreté du Québec’s Homicide Chief, Armand Gamache, is recovering from his barely averted execution at what should have been the successful conclusion of his latest investigation. It seemed like it was. It certainly looked as if they’d caught and convicted the correct villain.

And that the plot to poison Montréal’s water supply had been averted, at the last possible moment, by a turncoat to that cause. All should be well, and that is what most people believed.

But Gamache’s words to his two seconds, Agents Isabelle Lacoste and Jean-Guy Beauvoir, break that oh-so-comforting belief. As Gamache utters those fateful words, “We have a problem,” Isabelle and Jean-Guy know their patron is unfortunately right.

They made a mistake. Possibly two. They might have followed an entirely too convenient chain of evidence and convicted the wrong man for the plot. Not that the former Deputy Premier of Québec is exactly innocent – because that’s never been true as Gamache knows personally and entirely too well – but that the man isn’t guilty of this heinous act.

But whether Marcus Lauzon was the kingpin of the plan to poison Montréal’s water supply or not, it’s the plan itself that they were all absolutely wrong about. Because that act, as horrifying as it is to contemplate for ALL concerned, was not the end of those plans as they’d all believed. Or at least wanted to believe and hoped was the truth.

The problem that Gamache has seen is that what they all believed was the end of the plot was merely the opening act of a production that was still very much in progress. The problem will be finding the evidence to convince the right people in the right positions of power that there is something worse than the potential deaths of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Montréal residents on the horizon.

Literally.

There’s a war coming. A war that, once it’s seen, can’t be unseen. But it can be staved off, maybe not indefinitely, but for a generation – or two. Maybe longer if both sides get together instead of pretending it’s not happening.

Unless, someone believes they can control the tide of history by forcing the future into the now – no matter the cost as long as they come out on top.

The question that haunts Gamache, and looms over the entire story, is as real as it is deadly. “What happens when water runs out?”

Escape Rating A++: Like last year’s The Grey Wolf, this 20th book in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series (start with Still Life, pretty please and with bells on, if you love excellent mystery suspense series!) is entirely too apropos for even post-Halloween. Because it’s utterly chilling in ways that linger long after the final page is turned. It should end triumphantly – and it kind of does. The vast conspiracy that was uncovered in The Grey Wolf is finally laid to rest in this follow-up. Hopefully. Probably. Almost certainly.

But, as the saying goes, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” While the immediate danger of this conspiracy seems to be over, the crisis that it attempted to exploit is not. And will not be. So the ending of The Black Wolf manages to be both satisfying and utterly frightening at the same time. It’s lingering with me in a way that I can’t shake – and I hope that’s true for a LOT of readers, because it needs to be. And it’s what pushed this compelling story from a ‘mere’ A+ to an A++. Because it’s still got me in its grip even after attempting to let it settle for a couple of day. It’s not settling – because the implications are unsettling.

Like most of the later stories in this series, the plot operates on multiple levels. There’s always the ongoing story of Gamache, his colleagues and his family and how those two have merged into one, along with contributions from the residents of the village of Three Pines, especially the poet Ruth Zardo and her duck, Rosa.

Then there’s the second level, that of the case that Gamache is caught up in and/or about to be run over by. Or both. This time it’s both because he did such a thorough job of convicting the perpetrator in the previous book that he’s now in the position of discrediting his previous investigation while at the same time trying desperately to figure out who he can trust vs who was part of making sure he and his team walked down that first primrose path. It’s fortunate for the story, if not for Gamache’s own reputation, that he doesn’t put much stock in what other people think of him – even when it’s the worst it could be.

So he’s operating in the shadows, pretending that previous events have left him less capable than he actually is, looking for needles in haystacks, laptops in treetops and monsters in shadows, hoping he’s wrong but knowing that this time he’s righter than he was – even if he’s still not quite correct. Again. Because there’s another primrose path and it’s every bit as beguiling as the first.

And he’s not the only one being misled, which is where this story gets into the real and the scary and the all-too-frighteningly possible. Even probable over the long term. And where those fears directly intersect with the power of social media, the willingness of humans to give up a little privacy for a little security, and the ability of demagogues, particularly when amplified by an internet megaphone that allows the truth to be manipulated right before their very eyes, to manipulate the very same “Ministry of Truth” that George Orwell portrayed in 1984.

(If you’ve read either 1984 or Animal Farm, both by George Orwell, both classics get referred to a LOT and for excellent reasons. If you’ve read the more recent Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler, there’s a bit of that here too and they’re all worth reading both for context and because they are all great stories with huge amounts of both resonance and relevance.)

I got caught up in the possibilities, because some of them are a bit too real – made even realer by the way that the author anticipated political realities in 2025 that were not yet in evidence when she wrote this book in 2024.. At the same time, the case itself was not just riveting, but the stakes for all of the involved parties – especially Gamache and his extended family – were nail-bitingly dangerous. There were points where I was scared out of my socks that something terrible was about to happen to these characters that I’ve come to care so much about – and I didn’t want to see any of them falter or fall. But I had to know, so I kept being drawn right back into the thick of the story.

To an ending that turned out be a closure, but not a catharsis. THIS mystery is solved, But it feels like the real suspense has only just begun. Which, I’m okay with, at least in the sense of this story, because it means that Chief Inspector Gamache will be back, hopefully this time next year.