Regular readers will remember that in his previous outing, he managed to break a large international drug cartel however, a shipment of drugs used as a diversion disappeared and Gamache was blamed. As well, they enable Penny to keep her delightful Three Pines fresh book after book.Īlong with the baroness’s crooked house, which collapses and kills a man, Gamache has more on his plate. But the ongoing characters, particularly Ruth Zardo, the cranky poet and her foul-mouthed fowl friend the duck, never lose their ability to charm and also add to the plot. This contrast of beauty and death is always the soul of Penny’s books. They know that the beauty of the countryside in snow is also a killer. As the temperature drops to -35, and the drifts build, the villagers gather at the local inn for comfort and companionship. A particularly harsh Quebec winter is building to a blizzard. The crooked house and its eventual collapse is the main mystery, but fans know to expect several lines of suspense in a Gamache book and the action leads back, first, to the idyllic village of Three Pines.

Why are they here? Gamache surveys the abandoned house and recalls the child’s nursery rhyme about the crooked man who walked a crooked mile, found a sixpence, brought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse, “and they all lived together in a little crooked house.” What mystery is here? Eventually, another invitee arrives, Myrna, who runs the Three Pines bookstore. Under glowering clouds and the promise of snow, Gamache is summoned to a ramshackle farmhouse that belonged to Bertha Baumgartner, a deceased woman who claimed to be a baroness but who worked as a domestic. Penny always opens her novels with a bang and this one is a beaut. Here, the drama is in the atmosphere and the descriptions. If you doubt that, just sit down and read Kingdom of the Blind, her fourteenth Chief Superintendent Armand Gamache novel, and be swept into the perfect village in the grip of the perfect storm. Louise Penny is the best mystery novelist in Canada. There is a point where I’ve run out of superlatives and this is it.

Kingdom of the blind book