“Burn our ships” Whatever could that mean? Three words written on a napkin gleaned from a casual comment over a luncheon with a colleague Chief Superintendent Armand Gamache took that note and locked it in his desk drawer. Along with it was a notebook with his plan to do what?
The story opens in a courtroom without air conditioning. Gamache is a witness, after the fact, for the prosecution. The Chief Crown Prosecutor Barry Zalmanowitz is grilling him about the facts surrounding the murder in Three Pines. The two men intensely dislike each other. Judge Corriveau sees a tension between the men that she doesn’t understand. Gamache’s plan, that had yet to be fully revealed, would never have been approved, because it involved illegalities on the part of the Chief Superintendent. His purpose was to protect the public.
Home to his wife, Reine-Marie in Three Pines, he was content to live a quiet life. Three Pines, not even on the map and very out of the way, had few visitors. It was the night of the annual Hallowe’en party. Every one knew everyone except for the tall person all dressed in a long hooded black costume. He - or she - never spoke. When everyone went home and continued on their lives, the hooded figure reappeared in the morning in the village green to stand silently, ominously looking steadily toward the bistro. The bistro was a cozy gathering place for the residents. With each day that passed, the hooded figure never moving, tension mounted in the village. Research done by Beauvoir revealed that this figure was consistent with the Spanish history of a cobrador del frac. A frock coated collector of debts in reality, but developed by Louise Penny as a conscience. This figure was confronted once by an angry villager, but Gamache stopped him, saying that standing on the green was not illegal. The village grew nervous and afraid, not knowing what they should fear. Gamache, his second in command and son-in-law, Chief Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir kept a close eye on this spectre who was doing no harm.
The two officers of the Sûreté were distracted by a much greater problem. The escalating problem of opiates being funnelled through Québec.Yet when Reine-Marie Gamache discovers the body of a woman in the basement of the church, the story takes on a different urgency. Viciously murdered and beaten, she was dressed in the hooded robe of the cobrador. A bloody bat was found leaned up again a basement wall by the Sûreté. Only when Reine-Marie privately tells her husband that there was no bat when she discovered the body, did Gamache become suspicious.
From the quiet scenic village to an all out drug war, Louise Penny took us slowly, almost painfully, into Gamache’s plan. What was the person in black? Who would be murdered and who was the killer? Why was Three Pines chosen as the narrow end of the funnel for drug runners?
Would Chief Superintendent Gamache jeopardize his carrier, the career of others and the lives of many addicts to achieve this goal? Would it be worth it or should he have not followed his conscience? In the courtroom, would Judge Corriveau have him arrested and jailed?
Drug cartels and the underworld, the supposed incompetence of the Sûreté and who survived. History of rum running and today’s world of running drugs. Louise Penny fit it all together quite snugly. Armand Gamache is her main character in a series of mystery novels from 2005 to the present. This is only the second of her books that I’ve read. Time to read her others!
“It wasn’t really, he knew, about less fear. It was about more courage,”
~ Louise Penny, Glass Houses
Author:Louise Penny
Copyright: 2017
Publisher: Three Pines Creations, Inc.
For information, address:
St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
Type: Novel
Format: Hard cover
ISBN: 97801250066190
LCCN: 2017021224
ISBN (international): 978125064889
ISBN (ebook): 9781466873681
No comments:
Post a Comment