• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2014 July #1
  *Starred Review* Until now, Penny's challenge in her best-selling Armand Gamache series was to imagine new ways to take the chief inspector of the Sûreté du Québec from his Montreal home to the vividly evoked village of Three Pines, the author's setting of choice. Now, with Gamache retired to Three Pines, there is a new challenge: coming up with reasons to get her hero out of town. No challenge is too great for Penny, as skillful a plotter as she is a marvelous creator of landscape and character. Still grieving over the carnage that wreaked havoc with those he loves and with Three Pines itself (How the Light Gets In, 2013), Gamache reluctantly agrees to come to the aid of his friend, artist Clara Morrow, who is worried about her husband, fellow artist Peter, who has failed to return to Three Pines after their agreed-upon one-year separation. Gamache and his former assistant, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, follow Peter's trail to Europe and back to Toronto, where he visited his former art teacher, and on to the remote mouth of the St. Lawrence River. In search of artistic inspiration, Peter may have found something very different and much more lethal. As always, Penny dexterously combines suspense with psychological drama, overlaying the whole with an all-powerful sense of landscape as a conduit to meaning. The wilds of the upper St. Lawrence, once called "the land God gave to Cain," combine echoes of mysticism with portents of evil, permeating the air with the same violent forces that roil within the characters. Another gem from the endlessly astonishing Penny. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Penny appears to have reserved a lifetime seat atop best-seller lists everywhere, and, with the appearance of her latest, she will take her place once again. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

LOUISE PENNY is the author of the #1 New York Times and Globe and Mail bestselling series of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels. She has won numerous awards, including a CWA Dagger and the Agatha Award (six times), and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. In 2017, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture. Louise lives in a small village south of Montréal.