It starts as a series of seemingly unrelated events. Two unrelated people are killed, hundreds of kilometers apart, in the exact same execution style. An elderly visitor leaves a bottle of terrible-tasting liqueur at the bistro in Three Pines. An old coat belonging to Armand Gamache, head of Homicide for Quebec’s Surete, is stolen from his Montreal apartment, and then returned. In a pocket is a list of spices, and a single word – water. Then a young man, an activist for an environmental group, meets with Gamache – and run over in a car inches away from Gamache himself. The driver is later founded murdered.
Gamache and his team, Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste, will soon learn that they are dealing with a planned terrorist act, designed to destabilize the government, institute a dictatorship, and involving officials at almost the very top of Canada’s political leadership. They will travel to remote monasteries, the Vatican, Washington, D.C., and a remote fishing village in Labrador, desperately trying to determine what’s planned and when.
Louise Penny
The Grey Wolf is the 19th novel in the Armand Gamache series by Canadian author Louise Penny. It’s a gripping, creative fast-paced story, with an ending that keeps the reader on the edge of his seat to the very end. And while it does its predecessor novels proud, very little of the story involves Gamache’s home village of Three Pines and its collection of unusual residents. On the plus side, it avoids the trap its predecessor novel, A World of Curiosities, fell into, when we were given a bit too much of the author’s personal politics.
What it does have, however, is the promise of the next installment in the series. Because with a grey wolf, there is a black wolf.
Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache novels have been bestsellers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. She’s received numerous awards, including a Crime Writers Association Dagger Award and the Agatha Award, and she’s been a finalist for the Edgar Award. In 2017, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture. She lives near Montreal.
Related:
My review of Kingdom of the Blind.
My review of A Great Reckoning.
My review of The Long Way Home.
My review of How the Light Gets In.
My review of The Beautiful Mystery.
My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light.
My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.
My review of Penny’s Still Life.
My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.
My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.
My review of The Brutal Telling.
My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.
My review of All the Devils Are Here.
My review of The Madness of Crowds.
My review of A World of Curiosities.
Some Wednesday Readings
The Patron Subjects: Who were the Wertheimers, the family that sat for a dozen of John Singer Sargent’s paintings? – Jean Strouse at The American Scholar.
Fading Light – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian.
Monumental painting in SLAM’s collection only known survivor of its kind – St. Louis Art Museum.
Bah Humbug: The Crime of Loneliness in Holiday Stories – Lindy Ryan at CrimeReads.
The Outsized Impact of George Cukor’s “Gaslight” – Bonnie Kistler at CrimeReads.
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