In this 16th book in the 'Chief Inspector Armand Gamache' series, the detective probes a criminal conspiracy in Paris. The book provides enough background to be read as a standalone.
*****
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the homicide department at Montreal's Sûreté du Québec, had career ups and downs as he rooted out corruption at the Sûreté. Now Gamache and his wife Reine-Marie are visiting their married children in Paris, and Gamache once again encounters corruption, this time in industry and banking.
The Gamaches' son Daniel is a banker.....
.....and their pregnant daughter Annie is a lawyer.
Annie is married to Jean-Guy Beauvoir, who was a homicide investigator at the Sûreté until he took a job in quality control at Paris's GHS Engineering.
The entire Gamache family is excited about the imminent birth of Annie's second child, and even Armand's godfather - the nonagenarian billionaire Stephen Horowitz - is in Paris for the event.
After dinner at a favorite restaurant, the Gamaches and Horowitz are taking a walk when a car deliberately hits the billionaire and speeds away. Stephen is barely clinging to life in the hospital when the Paris police begin their inquiries. Armand tells the cops he SAW the car target Stephen, but the gendarmes seem skeptical, and insinuate the incident was an unfortunate accident.
Armand knows what he saw, however, and mounts his own investigation. Thus Armand and Reine-Marie visit the luxury apartment Stephen keeps in Paris, and find the home in complete disarray, a body on the floor, and the scent of an exotic cologne in the air.
Oddly enough, Stephen had also rented a VERY expensive hotel suite in Paris, and that had been ransacked as well, as had the billionaire's home and office in Montreal.
With a corpse in Stephen's apartment - and all his homes and offices burglarized - the Paris police acknowledge Stephen's 'accident' was attempted murder....and someone is desperate to find something.
Armand discovers that Horowitz had planned to attend the annual board meeting of GHS engineering - where Jean-Guy works - and that he had been looking into serious accidents around the world, including elevator failures, train derailments, airplane crashes, and so on. Moreover, Stephen had been consulting with the bank that employs Daniel Gamache, which invests in venture capital projects.
Gamache concludes Horowitz had discovered something rotten in Paris, and someone wanted to shut him up and make off with the evidence. Given Stephen's recent activities, Gamache suspects people working at GHS engineering and personnel at Daniel's bank. More ominous yet, the exotic cologne wafting around the corpse in Stephen's apartment is used by two senior police officials.
As the story unfolds, it becomes obvious that an evil cabal will do ANYTHING to preserve their secret, and the lives of the entire Gamache family are at risk.
The book also delves into aspects of Armand's personal life, especially the tension that's existed between Armand and his son Daniel for decades. We learn the reason for the estrangement, and see Armand's attempts to repair the damage. Armand tells Daniel "I love you" over and over and over, and other family members also continually express their love for each other. I'm all for family love but all this treacly affection is icky.
Some light relief in the book is provided by the Gamache grandchildren, who do cute kiddie things. Annie and Jean-Guy's little boy Honoré loves the crusty poet Ruth and her duck Rosa, who live in the Montreal village of Three Pines.
Rosa's quacks sound like f**k, f**k, f**k, and Honoré shouts this out in a crowd. Honoré also knows all the words to 'What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor."
As always in this series, the characters eat a lot of delicious food, like baguettes, terrine de campagne, an omelet with aged Comté cheese and tarragon, rice pudding with salted caramel, and more.
Baguette with butter
Terrine de campagne
Omelet with aged comté cheese and tarragon
Rice pudding with salted caramel
The Paris conspiracy is complex and there's a large array of characters, so the story requires a good bit of concentration. For readers who miss the Montreal hamlet of Three Pines, the author provides a glimpse at the end, when Armand and Reine-Marie return home and see their friends and neighbors.
For me the wrongdoing at the heart of the cabal is not explained completely enough, but I enjoyed the novel and recommend it to mystery fans.
Rating: 3 stars
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