by Louise Penny
Book 16 in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series
published 2020
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The sixteenth in Louise Penny’s #1 New York Times bestselling Chief Inspector Gamache novels.
On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather as a family for a bistro dinner with Armand’s godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz. Walking home together after the meal, they watch in horror as Stephen is knocked down and critically injured in what Gamache knows is no accident, but a deliberate attempt on the elderly man’s life.
When a strange key is found in Stephen’s possession it sends Armand, his wife Reine-Marie, and his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, from the top of the Tour d’Eiffel, to the bowels of the Paris Archives, from luxury hotels to odd, coded, works of art.
It sends them deep into the secrets Armand’s godfather has kept for decades.
A gruesome discovery in Stephen’s Paris apartment makes it clear the secrets are more rancid, the danger far greater and more imminent, than they realized.
Soon the whole family is caught up in a web of lies and deceit. In order to find the truth, Gamache will have to decide whether he can trust his friends, his colleagues, his instincts, his own past. His own family.
For even the City of Light casts long shadows. And in that darkness devils hide.
As with all the stories in this series, the elaborate plot threads are intricately and masterfully woven throughout the telling. The family dynamics are exploited in a way with which most readers can identify, while drawing them deeper into the plot. The hero is not the perfect father. Friends are not one dimentional. The City of Light harbours a dark force that requires all of the hero’s mental and physical resources to understand and act upon while protecting what he values most, at all costs to himself.
Just what we have come to expect from this author; a masterful telling and deeply satisfying, deeply human, mystery.