There was evidence to show local involvement. It didn’t take long for Gamache to determine that Fiona and Sam Arsenault had been groomed and pimped out. Her children had reported her missing, but the thirteen-year-old girl and ten-year-old boy were alone when Gamache went to inform them of her death.

They were at the scene where a Clotilde Arsenault’s body had been washed onshore, and Beauvoir insisted she had been murdered. Although Beauvoir had been relegated to the basement of an outpost of the Sûreté du Québec, Gamache suspected there might be something in the angry, disrespectful man. It also changed the direction of Armand Gamache’s life as he applied for the homicide division.Ī World of Curiosities takes us back to the first time Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir met twenty years earlier. The event changed Canadian history, as women fought for gun control. Fourteen died, and thirteen more were wounded. The gunman only targeted women who dared enter a man’s world and become engineers. That day thirty years earlier lives in Canadian history as a misogynistic attack on women. 6, 1989, Gamache was a police officer but one who also trained as a paramedic when a gunman struck at Ecole Polytechnique. Now, Louise Penny takes readers back in time, thirty years, twenty years, to terrible crimes and unforgettable killers. Perhaps it was meant to do that, but it was the first time I had been disappointed in a book in this series. However, I felt as if I had returned to a familiar world with this latest novel, and the last book left me feeling uncomfortable and disjointed. A reader can’t breathe a sigh of relief until the last page because Penny ratchets up the tension as much as she has ever done. I won’t say I breathed a sigh of relief when I read the eighteenth book, Louise Penny’s A World of Curiosities. I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t a fan of the last Gamache book, The Madness of Crowds.

A world of curiosities series