In this 17th book in the 'Chief Inspector Armand Gamache' series, the homicide detective investigates a New Year's Eve murder.
*****
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the homicide department at Montreal's Sûreté du Québec, was visiting Paris for his last adventure. Gamache is now back in his home town of Three Pines, where he sheltered during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The pandemic is now over, and Gamache is asked to provide security for a visiting academic. Professor Abigail Robinson is a statistician who wrote a report on the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic in Canada, with a view to mitigating future crises. Robinson's conclusions are VERY controversial, and as such things go, are passionately embraced by some and soundly excoriated by others.
Robinson has been invited to give a lecture at the Université de l’Estrie, and the school officials want to avoid trouble. So Gamache and his team will be on hand to control the crowd and protect the speaker.
There's an incident at the lecture, and Robinson - who's staying at the home of a friend - is told to stay put while Gamache looks for the conspirators. But it's the holiday season, and Robinson decides to attend a festive New Year's party at the Auberge Hotel in Three Pines. When the fireworks go off at midnight.....
.....someone is murdered, and Gamache and his colleagues, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir (who's also Gamache's son-in-law) and Inspector Isabelle Lacoste, investigate.
The detectives soon learn that Abigail Robinson had an ulterior motive for visiting Three Pines, which expands the murder inquiries to an administrator at the Universite de l’Estrie and a retired doctor.
In the meantime, Three Pines has another distinguished visitor, a 23-year-old Sudanese woman named Haniya Daoud, who's a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. During Sudan's civil war Daoud saved many people, and ugly scars are proof of her bravery. Daoud has a grudge against the outside world, however, for turning their backs on Sudan during the crisis, and the result is rude and crusty behavior.
As all this is going on Gamache's wife Reine-Marie, who's retired from her job as a library curator, is doing free-lance curatorial work.
A family whose deceased matriarch left a smaller than expected estate asks Reine-Marie to examine their mother's things, to see if they're worth anything. Reine-Marie discovers that the dead woman was obsessed with monkeys - drawing them everywhere - and Reine-Marie tries to determine why.
In the end all these threads (more or less) come together, and the big picture is truly tragic.
I'm in the minority here, but for me this is one of the weakest books in the series, for the following reasons:
◙ It takes FOREVER for the author to reveal the divisive conclusions in Abigail Robinson's statistical report. The delay is annoying and unnecessary and the revelation is predictable.
◙ The murder occurs later in the novel than it should, for a murder mystery.
◙ The murder investigation is 90% talk. The detectives ENDLESSLY speculate about who did what and why, envisioning innumerable scenarios involving the same group of people. The book could easily have been cut by a third.
◙ There's a lot of blather about people doing this and that for love, and the power of love, and love being the most important thing in the world. It gets cringey and - in the end - doesn't provide a good rational for the crimes.
I admire Penny's efforts to incorporate the Covid-19 pandemic into a novel - and the story has some high points - but the book isn't wholly successful (in my opinion).
That said, I always like to visit with the residents of Three Pines, especially the eccentric trash-talking poet Ruth and her beloved duck Rosa. It's a hoot that potty-mouth Rosa (inadvertently) teaches children bad words.
I've read many of Penny's Armand Gamache novels, and they're always up and down for me.....so I'll keep reading them. 😃
Rating: 3 stars
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