Still Life: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny.How the Light Gets In (Chief Inspector Gamache #9) by Louise Penny.A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny (Chief Inspector Gamache #12) Purchase Links: It is rare that such a late book in the series can hold up so well. I have no idea where Louise Penny can go from here.

The Three Pines characters are still present, but the murder is at the Academy, and instead of one of the backgrounds of our characters, it is the background of Three Pines itself that is part of the reveal. The scales of corruption and historical revelation, while vast, are reasonable. There are no super weapons or country wide conspiracies. Not everything can be controlled, especially when Gamache does not fully understand the depths of the depravity at the Surete Academy. Gamache’s plans are both extraordinary in their scope as things are revealed, and inadequate to the situation. And there are young cadets that have to be protected and mentored and investigated. He hopes he can use them to root one another’s corruption while keeping them under control.īut someone ends up dead. Gamache feels like the only way to solve the problem of the academy is to fire most of the bad teachers, but keep the one he thinks is the ringleader and then bring back the privately disgraced, but not incarcerated, former head of the Surete as one of the staff. There is a timeline issue with one of the big reveals that just doesn’t make sense to me (the age of one of the characters and the secret relationship to Gamache’s history doesn’t really work.) But if you set aside the questionable reality of the police corruption and personal vendetta angles and just read them as a story, it rolls out nicely. It is too big and too small at the same time. The corruption angle I think has been problematic from the start. I really like this series and this is one of the best books in the series. But Gamache still feels to pull to continue to root out the corruption inside the police force from the previous several books.

Gamache and his wife are retired in the small village of Three Pines.

But there is a lot of assumed back story. Summary: Stepping out of retirement, former Chief Inspector Gamache, has agreed to take over Surete (Quebec police) academy.Ī Great Reckoning is not a novel that you want to pickup if you are new to the series.

A great reckoning