Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache

A++ #BookReview: The Black Wolf by Louise Penny

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
A++ #BookReview: The Black Wolf by Louise PennyThe Black Wolf (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #20) by Louise Penny
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #20
Pages: 384
Published by Minotaur Books on October 28, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

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.

Grade A #BookReview: The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Grey Wolf by Louise PennyThe Grey Wolf (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #19) by Louise Penny
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #19
Pages: 425
Published by Minotaur Books on October 29, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The 19th mystery in the #1 New York Times-bestselling Armand Gamache series.
Relentless phone calls interrupt the peace of a warm August morning in Three Pines. Though the tiny Québec village is impossible to find on any map, someone has managed to track down Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté, as he sits with his wife in their back garden. Reine-Marie watches with increasing unease as her husband refuses to pick up, though he clearly knows who is on the other end. When he finally answers, his rage shatters the calm of their quiet Sunday morning.
That's only the first in a sequence of strange events that begin THE GREY WOLF, the nineteenth novel in Louise Penny's #1 New York Times-bestselling series. A missing coat, an intruder alarm, a note for Gamache reading "this might interest you", a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list—and then a murder. All propel Chief Inspector Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching.
Armand Gamache, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his son-in-law and second in command, and Inspector Isabelle Lacoste can only trust each other, as old friends begin to act like enemies, and long-time enemies appear to be friends. Determined to track down the threat before it becomes a reality, their pursuit takes them across Québec and across borders. Their hunt grows increasingly desperate, even frantic, as the enormity of the creature they’re chasing becomes clear. If they fail the devastating consequences would reach into the largest of cities and the smallest of villages.
Including Three Pines.

My Review:

You’ve heard the parable – even if you don’t recognize it at first. It’s often attributed to the Cherokee, but occasionally to a different Native American tribe. It’s the story about the two ‘wolves’ that battle inside each soul. One wolf represents the darker parts of human nature; anger, envy, jealousy, greed, arrogance, etc. Because that wolf is the embodiment of the dark side, it is often pictured as a black wolf.

The other wolf represents the better angels of our nature; joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, truth, compassion, etc. That is the grey wolf.

As the parable goes, the wolf that wins the endless battle within each soul is the one that is fed by the thoughts and deeds of that person.

Having gotten to know Chief Inspector Armand Gamache over the course of this series, it’s all too easy to see Gamache as the embodiment of that grey wolf. At this point in his life and career, in more ways than one as he has literally become a grey wolf, older, sadder, wiser, but still fighting the good fight to do his best by his people and his province, in spite of the black wolves arrayed against him.

Including the one inside his own soul.

This particular case begins, as so many of Gamache’s cases begin, with a series of unrelated events that, on the surface have zero in common. Two murders, close together in time but remote and as far apart as they could be in the vast province of Québec, committed in precisely the same manner as a mafia hit. Even though neither victim appears to have any connections whatsoever with the ‘Sixth Family’ that controls organized crime in the province.

Someone breaks into Gamache family’s pied-à-terre in Montreal while he and his wife are at their home in Three Pines. But absolutely nothing appears to have been taken or damaged in the crime.

And last but absolutely not least, especially in Gamache’s mind and memory, a political operative that he crossed early in his career, who attempted to destroy him and his family and very nearly succeeded, calls in the middle of the night to say that she has information he should be interested in. Maybe he should be, but he’s absolutely not considering the source – with expletives.

At least, not until the unrelated incidents start coming together into a pattern that his instincts – if not the actual evidence before him –  tells him is the tip of a terrible iceberg. A pattern that tells him that there is something very, very rotten indeed in the Province de Québec, a pattern that will lead Gamache and his seconds-in-command, Isabelle Lacoste and his son-in-law Jean Guy Beauvoir, to the remotest corners of Québec, back to the scene of the lowest point and most desperate points in the relationships between Gamache and his son-by-birth Daniel as well as his son-by-adoption Beauvoir, and all the way to France, to a secure monastery keeping the secret of one of the world’s most famous recipes – and the potential application of one of the world’s deadliest poisons.

Gamache knows there is an enemy within – probably more than one. He has very few people he can trust absolutely, very little time and no authority with which to demand answers. And no faith that any of his desperate choices are the right ones. But he has to try, no matter the cost to his career or himself.

Because the nightmare he is desperate to prevent is only the beginning if he fails.

Escape Rating A: The Chief Inspector Gamache series, like many long-running series, tells each individual story on two levels. The particular work in hand, in this case, The Grey Wolf, focuses on the case that has been brought to Gamache’s attention at this moment in time, shows his team dealing with the clues and red herrings, figuring out which are which, and eventually solving the case or at least the immediate danger of it.

The other level is the one where things often get very deep, which in many ways goes all the way back to Gamache’s four things that lead to wisdom. As he explains to a group of young police officers in Still Life, “They are four sentences that we learn to say, and mean…I don’t know. I need help. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

And he lives by those principles – even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. And most especially when he discovers that he was wrong. Which he does, both in this story and in all the stories that have led him and his team to this point. Because the cop shop aspects of the usual mystery series have become a found family, AND Gamache has a tendency to tilt at big, important windmills that take that family into dangerous places and very fraught political circumstances.

This is one of those cases.

Which is where interesting and frustrating and really, truly frightening things happen in this story. As a criminal investigation, the reader is often caught up in Gamache’s own frustrations as the case is initially so elusive he’s not sure if there are one or several or precisely what it or they might be. Multiple people are playing multiple games, with both the best and worst of intentions, and it’s difficult for the reader to watch Gamache and his team flail around as much as this story forces them to.

It takes a lot of both investigation and speculation to pull this one together.

The frightening part, the part that makes this story a whole lot more fitting for Halloween week than I originally imagined, is the nature and scope of the vast criminal enterprise that Gamache has to stop. Because I don’t want to reveal the big secret, I’m going to do my damndest to talk around it.

The rot at the heart of this case, at first, read like some kind of supervillain shit. I mean that in all seriousness. It takes a situation that is already happening, that is already terrifying, that many people are trying to mitigate if not stop, something utterly real – and then posits that someone in a position of power is planning to deliberately cause an incident of deadly magnitude and then manipulate it to gain yet more power. Not in some wartorn country halfway around the globe, but in the heart of Canada.

And at first my mind went to Lex Luthor and some of his ilk and flew right out of my willing suspension of disbelief. But I kept thinking about it. And came to the unfortunately but truly frightening conclusion that it’s entirely too plausible. Then I started gibbering a bit because it so easily could. Not exactly this way, but threats of this magnitude are already on the horizon and people in power who would create and manipulate those threats are not merely waiting in the wings but believe they are in entirely too many ‘on-deck’ circles.

To make a very long story short, I picked this up because I simply love this series – especially its characters – very, very much indeed. Part of why I continue to read, book after book, is not just that those characters are fascinating, but that their relationships change shape over time. The way they work together is never static, and it often produces the kind of low-key bantering humor that arises in a group that knows each other well and loves each other much – and provides the light moments that this particular entry in the series definitely needed. And I love them all for it, even the crazy poet and her duck. If you’re looking for mysteries that are considerably more, and go infinitely deeper, than merely ‘whodunnit’, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is a treasure – especially when he takes us on a walk through dark places, as he does in The Grey Wolf.

Review: A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: A World of Curiosities by Louise PennyA World of Curiosities (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #18) by Louise Penny
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #18
Pages: 400
Published by Minotaur Books on November 29, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns in the eighteenth book in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny's beloved series.
It’s spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge.
But something has.
As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged, shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines.
But to what end?
Gamache and Beauvoir’s memories of that tragic case, the one that first brought them together, come rushing back. Did their mother’s murder hurt them beyond repair? Have those terrible wounds, buried for decades, festered and are now about to erupt?
As Chief Inspector Gamache works to uncover answers, his alarm grows when a letter written by a long dead stone mason is discovered. In it the man describes his terror when bricking up an attic room somewhere in the village. Every word of the 160-year-old letter is filled with dread. When the room is found, the villagers decide to open it up.
As the bricks are removed, Gamache, Beauvoir and the villagers discover a world of curiosities. But the head of homicide soon realizes there’s more in that room than meets the eye. There are puzzles within puzzles, and hidden messages warning of mayhem and revenge.
In unsealing that room, an old enemy is released into their world. Into their lives. And into the very heart of Armand Gamache’s home.

My Review:

Armand Gamache’s chickens come home to roost – and lay rotten eggs all over Gamache’s past cases, his present peace, and even Three Pines itself in this 18th book in the series.

A World of Curiosities is a story about reckonings, about settling up accounts and finding out that one has been found wanting. Even Armand Gamache. And that all of his mistakes, omissions and oversights have followed him home and put his family and friends in danger.

The roots of this story go deep, back to events that have been previously touched on but not described in detail, back to Armand’s own early cases as well as to the horrific case where he found Jean-Guy Beauvoir languishing in the basement of an outlying Sûreté office. Because Jean-Guy, being himself, was considered insubordinate. Because he wouldn’t play along.

A case that initially seems to be at the heart of it all. And is. But isn’t. But is after all. Again, one of Gamache’s oversight chickens that has come home to roost and shit all over Three Pines.

At first it all seems like an interesting bit of curiosity. A hidden room is found over the bookstore. It’s been bricked over – actually stoned over – for well over a century, lost to time and hidden from sight until a very old but newly discovered letter makes its way from an archive, to a dead woman, to the descendant of the man who bricked that room over all those years ago.

It’s not a straightforward path, rather a convoluted set of fits and starts that seems to have been in motion for years of its own. As was the intent of its patient and painstaking creator. A man who has been plotting his revenge against Armand Gamache for decades, and now has the perfect pawns in place to make Gamache pay.

Or so he believes.

Escape Rating A+: I know I’m not conveying this one well at all. Obviously, I loved it. I was also a bit disturbed by it, because all of the past crimes that lead up to this present danger were very disturbing.

The story opens at a combined commemoration and graduation ceremony at the École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal. The massacre was a real event, a 1989 mass killing of female engineering students by a man who was outraged by women moving into what were formerly male-only preserves.

In addition to bringing this horrific crime back into the light, it also serves as a way of introducing two of the important characters of this entry in the series, two young women, Harriet Landers and Fiona Arsenault, who both graduate as engineers during the ceremony.

It’s Fiona who links back to the earlier case, and it’s that earlier case that is so very disturbing. Because it began as a missing persons case, which turned into a murder case, which led to the discovery that Fiona and Sam Arsenault, ages 13 and 10 respectively, were being pimped out by their now-dead mother. And the damage that was done to them, that echoed through their lives and their personalities from those foundational experiences to the present day.

One of the questions that echoes down through this entire book is the question about not whether they were permanently damaged by their early experiences but just how much they were damaged and whether they can ever be something that might be considered saved or rehabilitated. That Gamache believes that Sam is the true sociopath while Jean-Guy believes it is Fiona doesn’t alter the question about whether either of them can contain their true natures well enough not to spend their lives harming themselves, each other and everyone around them.

Part of what makes the story such a riveting tangle, however, is the way that the focus is solidly on the Arsenaults and the questions about will they, won’t they, did they, don’t they that the true evil hiding in plain sight isn’t even glimpsed until very late in the game.

A World of Curiosities, like so many of the books in this marvelous series, was just about a one-sitting read for me. I started it at dinner and finished just before bed. Which was after midnight and the only reason it was before bed was that something about the story shook me up enough that I didn’t want to take it to bed with me. It was also one of the rare cases with this series where I did thumb to the end about midway through, not because I needed to find out whodunnit – I was happy to follow that trail with Gamache – but because I needed the reassurance that all my friends, the characters who have come to inhabit the series and the village of Three Pines, were going to come out of this alive if not unscathed.

I also realized that the characters are what I love this story for, rather than the process of the investigation and the sheer brilliance of the detectives. Not that Gamache and his colleagues are not generally brilliant, but that’s not the point for me. Every book in this series is such a deep character study, of Gamache, his family and friends, the villagers, and of course the perpetrators and even the red herring characters. Not that forensics and all the trappings of modern policing don’t play a part in the ultimate solution, but Gamache solves crimes by knowing and understanding the people involved and that’s what makes the series so compelling.

While the mystery in A World of Curiosities is a page-turning twisting, turning, swirling – and occasionally stomach-churning whodunnit, the real charm of the series is in its characters, and the best way to get every single drop of that charm is to start at the very beginning with Still Life.

Now I have a year at least to wait for the hoped-for 19th book in the series. In the meantime, there’s a brand new TV series titled Three Pines, based on the novels, that begins tonight on Amazon Prime. I know what I’ll be watching this weekend!

 

Review: The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Madness of Crowds by Louise PennyThe Madness of Crowds (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #17) by Louise Penny
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #17
Pages: 448
Published by Minotaur Books on August 24, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns to Three Pines in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny's latest spellbinding novel
You're a coward.
Time and again, as the New Year approaches, that charge is leveled against Armand Gamache.
It starts innocently enough.
While the residents of the Québec village of Three Pines take advantage of the deep snow to ski and toboggan, to drink hot chocolate in the bistro and share meals together, the Chief Inspector finds his holiday with his family interrupted by a simple request.
He's asked to provide security for what promises to be a non-event. A visiting Professor of Statistics will be giving a lecture at the nearby university.
While he is perplexed as to why the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec would be assigned this task, it sounds easy enough. That is until Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture.
They refuse, citing academic freedom, and accuse Gamache of censorship and intellectual cowardice. Before long, Professor Robinson's views start seeping into conversations. Spreading and infecting. So that truth and fact, reality and delusion are so confused it's near impossible to tell them apart.
Discussions become debates, debates become arguments, which turn into fights. As sides are declared, a madness takes hold.
Abigail Robinson promises that, if they follow her, ça va bien aller. All will be well. But not, Gamache and his team know, for everyone.
When a murder is committed it falls to Armand Gamache, his second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and their team to investigate the crime as well as this extraordinary popular delusion.
And the madness of crowds.

My Review:

There are four sentences that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache tells to every Sûreté du Québec officer who becomes a part of his team. He often ticks them off on his fingers as he recites them, and even though the order changes, the totality never varies.

“I’m sorry. I was wrong, I don’t know. I need help.”

Those four brief sentences may not be the path to wisdom, but they seem to be the path to being a good officer when taken to heart. And, as we all know in real life, any of them can be difficult to say, especially in the moments when they are most needed.

And they form an important backdrop to this seventeenth entry in the series, as Gamache finds himself saying the first three parts pretty much over and over again in this case that reaches back so far and has so many twists and turns that he is often forced to backtrack from his current course in his latest attempt to figure out exactly who did what in the past that lead to the dead woman in the snow in the present.

Not that there aren’t plenty of motives in the present as well, but those reasons don’t seem to apply to this particular corpse. A question that haunts and confuses Gamache’s entire investigation from its very beginning.

Deborah Schneider is in Three Pines with her childhood best friend Abigail Robinson. And there are PLENTY of reasons for people to want Robinson dead. Reasons that are rooted in the pandemic that has just passed. And it has passed in Three Pines, and seemingly even in the Province of Québec and Canada as a whole by the time this story takes place.

It seems that the Canadians, certainly the fictional ones, have been more reasonable about getting vaccinated and were more reasonable about wearing masks as well.

What people are not being at all reasonable about are the discoveries in the aftermath of the pandemic. Just as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina uncovered more than one long term care institution whose patients had been abandoned to the flood, the receding tide of the pandemic in Canada has uncovered many too many care homes, particularly for the elderly, where the patients were left to die by the people who were supposed to be caring for them.

How the Light Gets In by Louise PennyAnd Abigail Robinson, with her Ph.D. in statistics and her sterling reputation, has produced a technically correct but morally repugnant study that claims that Canada, in its entirety, will be unable to fully recover from the pandemic or any future such calamities if it doesn’t triage out of its population those who have the least chance of recovery and the greatest chance of becoming a long-term burden on the system and the rest of the population.

There are plenty of tired and scared people willing to follow her recommendations, a course of action that would transform the right to die into an obligation to die at a point predetermined by the government.

The recommendations are so morally repugnant that the Canadian government agency that funded the study has refused to endorse it or publish it. But in these days of instant internet communication, the report is everywhere and support for it is gaining ground.

If someone had killed Abigail Robinson, who has become an all-too-excellent and savvy representative of her terrible theory, no one would be terribly surprised. But Robinson is not dead. Instead, the woman who was her right-hand was bludgeoned to death with a fireplace log.

Was it just a case of mistaken identity? Or does the crime, and the reason for it, stretch back into the past – right along with the true origins of Robinson’s heinous proposal?

Escape Rating A-: On the one hand, I was very glad for this story to return to the series’ heart and home in Three Pines. And on the other, the pandemic hangs over everything like a bad smell, making this dark story even darker. Not that the story is bad, in fact it’s very, very good, but there’s a darkness in the past that needs to be uncovered, actually more than one such darkness, and a darkness in the present and the entire situation gets more than a bit murky.

So much of what makes this series work are its characters, not just Gamache himself but his close colleagues at the Sûreté du Québec and his friends and neighbors in the village of Three Pines. But it felt like there was maybe one too many new people, or people who weren’t fully integrated into the story, and it diffused the story a bit.

And the heart of the story was so damn personal. It’s clear from pretty much everyone’s reading of Robinson’s report that while it’s initial implementation is intended to force the elderly, particularly those with long-term health issues, to feel obligated to die – or that there will be literal death panels. But the implication is that the concept will be expanded to include anyone with permanent disabilities of any kind no matter what their age. People like Gamache’s infant granddaughter Isola who was born with Down syndrome.

Anyone who has a loved one with long term care issues has plenty of reasons to want to kill Robinson. But she’s not the one who is dead.

The case that Gamache must solve drags him out of his comfort zone, and into another governmentally sanctioned road to hell that links Robinson, the poet Ruth Zardo, and Three Pines’ resident “Asshole Saint”.

I started this one afternoon and finished it later that evening, because I couldn’t put the damn thing down. But it is a walk through dark places, and there are points where it seems like the twisty passages are all like. The origins of everything are so far back and the character holding a big chunk of the information Gamache needs is pretty much a lying liar every step of the way and I wanted a confrontation that needed to happen multiple times but never quite does. It also felt like there was one completely extraneous character, although who I felt that was shifted a bit. Rather like one of those large ensemble cast TV series that needs to lose one or two people to tighten up right and really zing.

But it still gave me an epic book hangover because I love these characters, felt for them, and wanted to spend more time with them. And I will, hopefully sometime next year with the OMG 18th book in the series!

Review: All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
Review: All the Devils Are Here by Louise PennyAll the Devils Are Here (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #16) by Louise Penny
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #16
Pages: 448
Published by Minotaur Books on September 1, 2020
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The 16th novel by #1 bestselling author Louise Penny finds Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Quebec investigating a sinister plot in the City of Light
On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather as a family for a bistro dinner with Armand’s godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz. Walking home together after the meal, they watch in horror as Stephen is knocked down and critically injured in what Gamache knows is no accident, but a deliberate attempt on the elderly man’s life.
When a strange key is found in Stephen’s possession it sends Armand, his wife Reine-Marie, and his former second-in-command at the Sûreté, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, from the top of the Tour d’Eiffel, to the bowels of the Paris Archives, from luxury hotels to odd, coded, works of art.
It sends them deep into the secrets Armand’s godfather has kept for decades.
A gruesome discovery in Stephen’s Paris apartment makes it clear the secrets are more rancid, the danger far greater and more imminent, than they realized.
Soon the whole family is caught up in a web of lies and deceit. In order to find the truth, Gamache will have to decide whether he can trust his friends, his colleagues, his instincts, his own past. His own family.
For even the City of Light casts long shadows. And in that darkness devils hide.

My Review:

How the Light Gets In by Louise PennyI finished this Saturday – actually I started on Saturday and finished on Saturday, hours later – and I’m still all book hungover on Sunday. I think that’s partially because I’ve been following these people since that wonderful, long ago first book, Still Life. This is a group that I’ve come to care about, to know, and in some cases even to love, to the point where I almost have to turn my eyes away when things get dark. As they often do. As Gamache discovers the crack in everything that has come before, and that’s how the light gets in.

But it’s also, positively, definitely because the story has me on the edge of my seat, every single time, desperate to figure out the truth that seems to be concealed from even the protagonists every step of the way. A truth that always delves deeply into the dark hearts of entirely too many of the characters, and makes every single one both a suspect and a victim.

As Gamache frequently says over the course of the series, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

It’s part of the genius of Gamache, and this series, that the reader is made to think all kinds of things about who is guilty, who is innocent, who is redeemable and who is not, things that only turn out to be half true, while Gamache and his colleagues, friends, companions, all of the above, follow the chain of evidence from its very murky beginning to what turns out to be its inevitable end, doing their level best – and Gamache’s best is damn good – to keep themselves from being caught up in their own thoughts – and especially in their own assumptions.

This story begins, as so many of the stories in this series begin, rather quietly. This is not a mystery series where the body turns up on the first page.

Instead, this one begins at a family dinner in Paris, celebrating that the family is all together again in anticipation of the imminent birth of Armand and Reine-Marie’s granddaughter, their daughter Annie’s soon-to-be-born daughter with Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s former second-in-command at the Sûreté du Québec – and unofficially adopted son.

The Gamaches’ own son, Daniel, and his wife Roslyn live in Paris, as Jean-Guy and Annie do now. Jean-Guy’s burnout from the last several cases he undertook with Gamache have led him to finally accept one of the many private sector jobs that have been offered to him over the years, bringing the family to Paris and Jean-Guy to a job he feels neither comfortable in nor exactly qualified for.

But he is. Just not for the job as it appears, rather for the “real” job that he’s been maneuvered into by Gamache’s godfather – and unofficial adoptive father – the billionaire Stephen Horowitz.

Because something is rotten at the core of GHS, the privately held multinational engineering firm GHS, even if Jean-Guy can’t quite put his finger on it. He thinks it’s his own second-in-command.

But Horowitz counted on Gamache getting involved. Because when it comes to Jean-Guy, or any of his children, Gamache can’t help but get himself involved. When Stephen is struck down in the middle of the street by what was expected to be taken as a hit and run driver, there’s a giant clue that no one can miss that something is rotten in Paris and that whatever Stephen was involved in is a part of it.

And if there’s one thing that Gamache is better at than anyone else in the world, it’s finding the rot that hides beneath a pristine facade. Even if that facade is covering a friend, or a loved one, or a trusted colleague. Or all of the above.

It’s only a question of whether he can figure out where that rot really leads in time to save them all.

Escape Rating A++: This is one of those reviews where I just want to squee all over the page. Which might adequately express that I LOVED THIS BOOK VERY MUCH, but isn’t exactly informative as to why you should love this series and this book too.

In the end – also at the beginning and in the middle – this is a mystery/suspense/thriller series that is all about the characters. Both in the sense that the continuing characters of the series are so very human, so fully-fleshed that they jump out of the page and into your heart, and in the way that human motivations drive the story and the tension.

There’s no “bwahaha” evil in this series. Not that plenty of evil things don’t happen, but the evil is always at the human scale – and is always pressed back if not defeated at the human scale.

The corruption that Gamache, Reine-Marie and Jean-Guy eventually unearth at the heart of this case is also human. It’s people believing what they want to believe. It’s people cutting corners out of expediency and then covering up out of guilt or greed. It’s a rotten system that has good people trapped in it but is designed to let bad people flourish.

And it thankfully doesn’t go quite as far as Gamache fears that it does, but we fear with him right up ‘til the end.

The characters are all flawed in ways that are, to belabor a word, human. Gamache does his best to figure out what is really going on, but he is, just as often, doing the best he can without any certainty of the truth or of his options. Sometimes he wings it and gets lucky. Sometimes he wings it and doesn’t. He’s good at piecing the puzzle together, but he’s never perfect and it’s never easy.

His godfather tries to outsmart the villains, but drastically underestimates their enemies and pays a high price for it. A price that nearly falls upon them all. Because he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. He needs Gamache to carry his plan the rest of the way – and he very nearly drops it.

In the end, this story, like so many in the series, is a story about people working together, playing to their individual strengths, towards their common goal of saving all their lives, sacrificing their fortunes if necessary, without losing their honor.

At each turn, we think we know. They think they know. But at the last we all discover that we really knew very little of what we thought we did. And that’s what kept me furiously turning pages until the very end.

If you like mysteries that will suck you into their story and their characters, keep you tied in knots for the entire length of a series, and spit you out at the end both emotionally wrung out and utterly captivated, pick up Still Life and be prepared to lose yourself for days.

Come to think of it, the idea of getting lost for days with Gamache and Company seems like an excellent way to escape this year for a good, long time.

Review: A Better Man by Louise Penny

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: A Better Man by Louise PennyA Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #15) by Louise Penny
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #15
Pages: 448
Published by Minotaur Books on August 27, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Catastrophic spring flooding, blistering attacks in the media, and a mysterious disappearance greet Chief Inspector Armand Gamache as he returns to the Surete du Quebec in the latest novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny.

It's Gamache's first day back as head of the homicide department, a job he temporarily shares with his previous second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Flood waters are rising across the province. In the middle of the turmoil a father approaches Gamache, pleading for help in finding his daughter.

As crisis piles upon crisis, Gamache tries to hold off the encroaching chaos, and realizes the search for Vivienne Godin should be abandoned. But with a daughter of his own, he finds himself developing a profound, and perhaps unwise, empathy for her distraught father.

Increasingly hounded by the question, how would you feel..., he resumes the search.

As the rivers rise, and the social media onslaught against Gamache becomes crueler, a body is discovered. And in the tumult, mistakes are made.

In the next novel in this "constantly surprising series that deepens and darkens as it evolves" (New York Times Book Review), Gamache must face a horrific possibility, and a burning question.

What would you do if your child's killer walked free?

My Review:

Just as the massive spring flooding brings massive destruction and wipes all away in its wake, so does the story in A Better Man sweep away what has come before it in this series and returns much (and many characters) back to the places where they began.

So, in spite of this being the 15th book in this marvelous series, it also feels like a great place for new readers to step into Three Pines and see what it’s all about.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, after the harrowing events at the end of The Long Way Home, is back where he began at the beginning of the series, Chief of the Homicide Bureau of the Sûreté du Québec. But this time his position is a demotion, as he had been Chief of the entire Sûreté, until his horrendous gamble nearly put millions of dollars of drugs back on the streets.

It’s supposed to be a humbling experience for him, so humbling that he wasn’t expected to accept it. Particularly as the outgoing Homicide Chief is his son-in-law and former second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir. But Jean-Guy is moving to Paris and leaving not just the Sûreté but his time as a police detective behind.

So Jean-Guy’s last case as Chief becomes Gamache’s first case, the disappearance of a battered young woman, a disappearance most likely caused by her violent, abusive husband, and most likely a fatal one.

The floodwaters are rising, Gamache’s career seems to be sinking, and the village of Three Pines stacks sandbags in a desperate hope to stem the rising tide. The solutions, to the murder, to the flood, to the seeming destruction of a storied career, and to the deep and difficult questions that always lay at the heart of ever story in this series, touch the heart at every twist and turn.

As the quote from Moby Dick that threads throughout this book goes, this is a story of “All truth with malice in it”. The truths are hard, and the malice is deadly.

Escape Rating A+: On the one hand, this entry in the series feels very much like a reset. When we began, all the way back in Still Life, Gamache was the Chief of Homicide in Montreal and Clara Morrow, one of the more interesting residents of Three Pines, was an unknown artist. When this book opens, Gamache is back to being Chief of Homicide, although he and his wife Reine-Marie now reside in Three Pines. And Clara has screwed up her once-thriving art career to the point where she’s back at her own beginning, certainly not unknown but definitely struggling again.

One of the threads of this story is Clara finally accepting that the terrible reviews she is receiving really are truth with malice in them, and that it is time to go back to the kind of brave work that she does best. Playing it safe will not serve her.

Just as playing it safe with the rising floodwaters will not save either Three Pines or Montreal, and it is up to Gamache to do the hard thing and risk his career (again) to save people’s lives.

It’s too late to save Vivienne Godin. It’s up to Gamache and Jean-Guy, together again one last time, to bring her justice. Not just for her murder, but for her life.

I’ll admit that I figured out part of the truth of Vivienne Godin’s murder fairly early on. But knowing the kernel of it did not make the story any less compelling, because as is so often the case in this series, it’s not about the murder. It’s about the human beings who are involved, the victims, the perpetrators, the bereaved family and friends AND the investigators.

It’s never just whodunnit and how they done it but more importantly why they did it – and that’s where Gamache and this series always grab the reader by the heartstrings.

One weird thought I had while reading this particular entry is that Gamache, in a very strange way, reminds me of Captain James T. Kirk. Not his swashbuckling cowboy persona, and not his lack of belief in the no-win scenario, because Gamache is all too aware that there are plenty of those, but in his eager willingness to take the demotion and return to the place where he could be his best and truest self. For Kirk it was being Captain of the Enterprise. For Gamache, it is just as clearly being Chief of Homicide of the Sûreté du Québec.

So as Jean-Guy flies off into the sunset, Gamache returns to the places where he belongs, the Homicide Bureau of the Sûreté and the town of Three Pines. And I can’t wait to go back there with him again.

Review: Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Kingdom of the Blind by Louise PennyKingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #14) by Louise Penny
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, thriller
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #14
Pages: 400
Published by Minotaur Books on November 27, 2018
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The new Chief Inspector Gamache novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author.

When a peculiar letter arrives inviting Armand Gamache to an abandoned farmhouse, the former head of the Sûreté du Québec discovers that a complete stranger has named him one of the executors of her will. Still on suspension, and frankly curious, Gamache accepts and soon learns that the other two executors are Myrna Landers, the bookseller from Three Pines, and a young builder.

None of them had ever met the elderly woman.

The will is so odd and includes bequests that are so wildly unlikely that Gamache and the others suspect the woman must have been delusional. But what if, Gamache begins to ask himself, she was perfectly sane?

When a body is found, the terms of the bizarre will suddenly seem less peculiar and far more menacing.

But it isn’t the only menace Gamache is facing.

The investigation into what happened six months ago—the events that led to his suspension—has dragged on, into the dead of winter. And while most of the opioids he allowed to slip though his hands, in order to bring down the cartels, have been retrieved, there is one devastating exception.

Enough narcotic to kill thousands has disappeared into inner city Montreal. With the deadly drug about to hit the streets, Gamache races for answers.

As he uses increasingly audacious, even desperate, measures to retrieve the drug, Armand Gamache begins to see his own blind spots. And the terrible things hiding there.

My Review:

The original quote is from the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” There’s irony in the use of the quote, as Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, currently the Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec , albeit under suspension, would never put himself in the place of the one-eyed man. He always believes that he is one of the blind – even as he fervently prays that he is not.

This is a story where there are two cases, as there often are in this series. One case initially seems trivial, but of course turns out to be much larger than it appears. But it does not tie into the other case in this story, the one that not only starts out large, but started out in the previous book in the series, Glass Houses.

Which itself was the culmination of a story that begin several books before that. Which is a hint that this series is best read in order and from its beginning in Still Life. And that it’s worth every moment of immersion with these people and in the quirky, semi-lost village of Three Pines.

The small case seems to be the easy part, at least at first. Someone has named Gamache, his neighbor Myrna Landers, and a builder from Montreal as the liquidators, we would call them executors, of her will. None of them knew the dead woman, and have no idea why she named them in her will. But Gamache and Myrna, a psychologist turned bookstore-owner, are intrigued enough to agree, as does the young builder.

When they all get blizzard-bound in Three Pines, it provides plenty of opportunity for Gamache to investigate the possible connections between the three of them and the dead woman, and for the residents of Three Pines to pass judgment on the young man unwittingly stuck in their midst.

This case, while it turns out to be a great deal larger than it originally seemed, also provides the source of most of the lighter moments in the story – as any protracted sojourn in Three Pines generally does.

Those lighter moments are needed, as the decisions that Gamache and his team made in Glass Houses are still hanging over their heads like the proverbial Sword of Damocles. Gamache has planned that the sword will fall on his head alone, but he is still making one last desperate attempt to clean up the deadly mess he created in order to eliminate the rot in his beloved Sûreté.

That his career will end as a result of his actions is a consequence that he can live with. Leaving the deadly opioid carfentanil on the streets of Montreal is not. But the piece he has left on the chessboard to clean up that mess may not be enough.

If she is not, her death will only be the first of thousands that will be rightfully laid at his door.

Escape Rating A+: I was riveted by this story, and at the same time there were points where I had to stop and literally turn my eyes away – it was just too much. There were times when I nearly lost faith with Gamache, it seemed against the character of the character I have grown to love and admire that he would send an agent into the literal heart of darkness and that the agent would be unaware that they had been sent. I should have known better.

And yet there was a point where that had seemed to happen. That a young Sûreté cadet had either committed a heinous act or had been set up to take the fall for one, and that the agent had been sent into the hellish streets where addicts wasted their lives in pursuit of their next fix of a drug that was certainly killing them. It seemed that the cadet had been sent out into the cold, into the streets from which they had been rescued, with no resources and no backup, in the hopes that the missing drugs could be found before they hit the streets and set off a wave of death from which there could be no escape.

It didn’t seem as if Gamache could have committed such a terrible betrayal, and yet it seemed that he had. It’s only at the end of the story that we discover the truth, bitter but not black after all.

The other, initially smaller case is equally bitter, if at a slight remove – throwing the parallels into stark relief. Gamache has taught all of his agents many hard lessons, among them the lesson that betrayal can only come from those who are closest. That is what it appears has happened with the young agent sent into the wild streets, and that is also at the heart of the story of the dead woman and the three confused liquidators.

In the end, the story is brought full circle, as the betrayals are revealed, the cases are closed, and the reckonings come due. The open arcs of story that began 30 years and many books ago have finally closed. It is possible that this is the end of the series. It could conclude at this point, but I truly hope not. These characters have taken on a life of their own, and I want to see it continue with all my heart.

If it does not, I’ll be echoing Gamache’s grandson Honore’s first words, imitating Rosa the duck. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Review: Glass Houses by Louise Penny

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: Glass Houses by Louise PennyGlass Houses (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #13) by Louise Penny
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #13
Pages: 400
Published by Minotaur Books on August 29th 2017
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

When a mysterious figure appears on the village green on a cold November day in Three Pines, Armand Gamache, now Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec, knows something is seriously wrong. Yet he does nothing. Legally, what can he do? Only watch and wait. And hope his mounting fears are not realized.
From the moment its shadow falls over Three Pines, Gamache suspects the creature has deep roots and a dark purpose. When it suddenly vanishes and a body is discovered, it falls to Gamache to discover if a debt has been paid or levied.
In the early days of the investigation into the murder, and months later, as the trial for the accused begins in a Montreal courtroom on a steamy day in July, the Chief Superintendent continues to struggle with actions he’s set in motion, from which there is no going back. “This case began in a higher court,” he tells the judge, “and it’s going to end there.”
And regardless of the trial’s outcome, he must face his own conscience.
In her latest utterly gripping book, number-one New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny shatters the conventions of the crime novel to explore what Gandhi called the court of conscience. A court that supersedes all others.

My Review:

I started Glass Houses while waiting for the eclipse to reach totality. And read it all the way home (there was a LOT of traffic). For this reader, the new Gamache book each year is every bit as much of a fascinating treat as the eclipse, with the added bonus that there’s a Gamache book every year, while the next eclipse won’t happen over the U.S. for another seven years.

I was not disappointed in either event.

As with several of the books in this series, Glass Houses is about more than it seems, and has its roots far back in the past. Not just Gamache’s past, but the past of the Sûreté du Québec, the agency that he loves, and to which he has given his life and his career.

How the Light Gets In by Louise PennyThere’s a saying that “the fish rots from the head down”. In many of the previous books in this series, culminating in How the Light Gets In, Gamache, while solving normal cases, or as normal as anything gets in Three Pines, is in the middle of getting rid of that rot, no matter the cost. And even though he does manage to get to the heart of the corruption, the fish has been rotting for 30 years. That rot has done a lot of damage, not just to the Sûreté, but to the people of Quebec.

The rotting fish was on the take. Unfortunately, not really a surprise. But what comes as a terrible surprise to Gamache and his inner circle is the terrible result of that rot, that taking. As this story begins, Gamache is now the head of the entire Sûreté du Québec, and not merely his own little corner in the Homicide Division. And what he has discovered is that the rot has gone on too long, and that it was rooted too deeply in the drug trade.

They’ve already lost the War on Drugs. They’ve passed the tipping point, and there’s no going back. Unless Gamache and his inner circle are willing to risk everything on one last throw of the dice. If they are willing to sacrifice  their reputations their careers and even their lives on one final million to one chance. If they can lure the drug kingpins, the snakes in their grass, into one final, fatal error.

Winner take all.

Escape Rating A: As so many of the books in this series, Glass Houses begins in Three Pines, that lost village near the U.S. border. And, also like many of the books in this series, it starts small. Someone is standing in the middle of the village green, black robed and black masked, terrorizing the village. Not by doing anything menacing, but simply by standing there, unmoved and unmoving, watching everyone in the village.

It, whatever it is, is there for someone. But whoever it is there to accuse, or warn, or menace, it is terrorizing everyone in the village with its ominous faceless gaze. And Gamache, now a full-time resident of Three Pines, can do nothing. Not that he doesn’t want to, but he really can’t. Standing on the village green in a mask is not illegal by itself. But when someone dies by its hand, or because of its presence, only then can he act. When it is seemingly too late.

The trial that results, from beginning to end, is a farce. But a farce with a purpose. Gamache and his colleagues, his co-conspirators, are ready to spring their trap. That they must subvert the cause of justice in order to save it is just one of the many tragedies wrapped inside this utterly compelling story.

Gamache is, as always, a fascinating character to watch. Although some of the early books in the series, beginning with Still Life, seem like more traditional mysteries than the later ones, there has always been a psychological element to the stories. Gamache solves crimes by searching for the why first. He’s a thoughtful observer, always looking for the thing or the person out of place. Once he knows why a crime occurred, from there he determines the who and the how. And the answers are never the obvious ones – and neither are his solutions.

(If this type of mystery appeals, then also try Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series. Maisie, like Gamache, looks for why because she searches out who and how. And her stories always have a deeper underlayer below the surface mystery, as does Gamache’s story)

A huge element of what makes this series so marvelous is the village of Three Pines and its quirky inhabitants, including Gamache and his wife Reine-Marie. Added to the mix of villagers (and often well-stirred into that mix) are Gamache’s two principal lieutenants, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his second-in-command at the Sûreté as well as his son-in-law, and Isabelle Lacoste, his handpicked successor in the Homicide Division.

For those of us who have followed this series from its beginning in Still Life, we know these people intimately. They are all old friends, and it is always wonderful to see them, even in the midst of yet another crisis. Their friendship provides support for Gamache, as well as surprising insights into events. There is always an undercurrent of wry humor, no matter how serious the case, and that humor is rooted in how well we know these people, and just how well they know each other. And how much they care. Just as we do.

They are all FINE, as the crazed poet Ruth Zardo puts it. Where FINE is an abbreviation for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic and Egotistical. Because aren’t we all?

Review: A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: A Great Reckoning by Louise PennyA Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #12) by Louise Penny
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #12
Pages: 400
Published by Minotaur Books on August 30th 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The next novel in Louise Penny's #1 New York Times bestselling series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache.
When an intricate old map is found stuffed into the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, it at first seems no more than a curiosity. But the closer the villagers look, the stranger it becomes.
Given to Armand Gamache as a gift the first day of his new job, the map eventually leads him to shattering secrets. To an old friend and older adversary. It leads the former Chief of Homicide for the Sûreté du Québec to places even he is afraid to go. But must.
And there he finds four young cadets in the Sûreté academy, and a dead professor. And, with the body, a copy of the old, odd map.
Everywhere Gamache turns, he sees Amelia Choquet, one of the cadets. Tattooed and pierced. Guarded and angry. Amelia is more likely to be found on the other side of a police line-up. And yet she is in the academy. A protégée of the murdered professor.
The focus of the investigation soon turns to Gamache himself and his mysterious relationship with Amelia, and his possible involvement in the crime. The frantic search for answers takes the investigators back to Three Pines and a stained glass window with its own horrific secrets.
For both Amelia Choquet and Armand Gamache, the time has come for a great reckoning.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny pulls back the layers to reveal a brilliant and emotionally powerful truth in her latest spellbinding novel.

My Review:

In this 12th book in the Chief Inspector Gamache series, maps ARE magic. And everyone is fine. Sometimes just fine but all too often FINE, poet Ruth Zardo’s acronym meaning “Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical.”

nature of the beast by louise pennyAt the end of the utterly marvelous The Nature of the Beast, Gamache (and the reader) are left with several burning questions. Only one of those questions gets answered in A Great Reckoning. It’s the question of what will Armand Gamache, retired Chief of the Homicide Division of the Sûreté du Québec, do for a second act? Gamache is in his late 50s, and still has more than enough time to make his mark on another service.

And there are plenty of services interested in letting him do just that. Not just in Canada, but internationally as well. In the end, he chooses to finish what he started in A Fatal Grace and brought to an explosive conclusion in How the Light Gets In. He has cleaned up the rot at the top of the Sûreté du Québec, but there is still a cesspool left at the bottom. Or at the beginning.

The corruption at the top wanted to make sure that it would continue to flourish for decades. The way to do that was to create new agents to fill in the ranks of those fallen by one wayside or another. The late and unlamented head of the Sûreté appointed his own agent to run the Sûreté Academy, thus ensuring an endless pipeline of young agents who had been trained to see the people they were supposed to serve as an enemy to be beaten and brutalized at every turn.

Gamache takes the position of Commander of the Academy, to root out the last vestiges of that rot. While he fires many of the corrupt “old guard” he leaves a few in place, under the principle of keeping his friends close and his enemies much closer.

But he doesn’t watch them carefully enough. He thinks he’s starting to get a handle on what has gone wrong. Some of the freshmen, at least, can be saved. But only if Gamache figures out exactly how deep and disgusting the merde is before it swallows both the Academy and himself whole.

By the time a corpse floats up out of the stink, it is almost, but not quite, too late.

Escape Rating A+: I finished this is less than a day. Just like so many books in this series, once I started, I couldn’t put it down.

There is always a mordant sense of humor in this series, Some of that is born from the situations, but much comes out of the very diverse characters that populate Gamache’s world and the village of Three Pines. Because we already love these people, even the frequently profane and generally misanthropic poet Ruth Zardo, the way that they interact with each other, the teasing and bantering that comes of long and loving friendship, brings a chuckle at the most unlikely of places.

still life by louise pennyThis is a series that rewards readers who start from the very beginning with Still Life. (Do not take the short cut of watching the made-for-TV movie instead of reading the book. This is a case where the movie does not remotely live up to the book. It’s not awful, but it isn’t really Gamache or Three Pines)

We start out with two mysteries, one seems new, and one is long-standing. In the end, both mysteries have been years in the making. And there’s a third, which we discover that we should have expected all along, but don’t even realize until near the end.

There has always been a mystery surrounding the village of Three Pines. It appears on no map. None. GPS can’t find it. There is no internet service and no satellite coverage. This seems like magic, or perhaps fantasy, but is nevertheless true. So when Reine-Marie Gamache finds a map to Three Pines among the detritus excavated from the walls of the bistro when it was redecorated, questions about the map spring up like weeds. Who drew this map? And why are there no others?

Gamache, in what seems like an attempt to engage some of the more disaffected students, assigns two seniors and two freshman the task of unraveling the mystery of the map and its origins.

When the much-feared and extremely corrupt former second-in-command at the Academy is found dead in his rooms with a copy of the map at his bedside table, the former and current purposes of the map take on sinister overtones. While it seems that Gamache continues the cadets’ assignment in order to keep them busy and safe in Three Pines, he always has a secondary and tertiary reason for everything he does.

And he really does want to solve this particular mystery. But not half as much as he needs to figure out who murdered Serge Leduc. Because someone seems determined to pin the murder on him. And while Gamache did not murder the slime, the more he uncovers about exactly what Leduc was doing to the cadets, the more he knows that he could have. Even his closest friends begin to suspect him.

In the end, this is a case that reaches back to the very beginnings of Gamache’s life, and who and what made him into the person he is. It is also a story that reminds us that the barbarian is not at the gates, but that we have already, perhaps unwittingly, let him in.

There’s a lesson in this story,as there often is in this series. In this case, it all boils down to, “Don’t believe everything you think.” You’ll think about that long after you close the book. I know I am.