The Madness of Crowds

March 1, 2021

In multi-award-winning Andrews's Murder Most Fowl, Meg Langslow's husband is directing a production of Macbeth even as gung-ho reenactors erect an authentic medieval Scottish military camp nearby, which ends in the murder of the unpleasant filmmaker documenting the reenactment (40,000-copy first printing). A BAFTA and multiple mystery award winner, novelist/filmmaker Claudel limns the current refugee crisis, with the inhabitants of backwater Dog Island refusing to disrupt their age-old way of life when three unidentified bodies wash ashore, deciding instead to bury them. In Edgar Award winner Hirahara's 1944-set Clark and Division, 20-year-old Aki, who has moved with her parents to Chicago after their release from the Manzanar concentration camp in California, refuses to believe that her sister Rose's death is a suicide. Lightning Strike, a prequel to Krueger's "Cork O'Connor" series, features Cork's coming-of age in small-town 1963 Minnesota. In Muller's Ice and Stone, durable PI Sharon McCone is enlisted by the organization Crimes Against Indigenous Sisters when two more Indigenous women are brutally dispatched in what the police refuse to regard as a pattern (25,000-copy first printing). The Madness of Crowds, the next in Penny's sensational "Chief Inspector Gamache" series, sends the chief inspector home to Three Pines, Canada, after a sojourn in Paris. Following Trinchieri's well-received debut, Murder in Chianti, The Bitter Taste of Murder finds former NYPD Nico Doyle comfortably settled in his late wife's Tuscan hometown--until the ruthless wine critic who's just arrived is murdered.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 14, 2021
Might a post-Covid Canada value individual lives less? That provocative question’s at the heart of bestseller Penny’s brilliant 17th whodunit featuring Sûreté du Québec Chief Insp. Armand Gamache (after 2020’s All the Devils Are Here). Gamache, who has been devastated to learn that nursing homes were abandoned during the pandemic, leaving the vulnerable residents to die alone, is discomfited to be asked to provide security for a lecture by a controversial figure, statistician Abigail Robinson. After analyzing the pandemic’s social and economic fallout for the Canadian government, Robinson concluded that the health care system and the economy would be in good shape, if only the elderly and infirm were euthanized so everyone else could have adequate resources. The government disclaimed her findings, but her views have proven disturbingly popular among a segment of the population. Gamache saves Robinson from an assassin’s bullet at the talk, but a related murder in his home village of Three Pines follows. Seamlessly integrating debates about scientific experimentation and morality into a fair-play puzzle, Penny excels at placing her characters in challenging ethical quandaries. This author just goes from strength to strength. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Company.

Starred review from July 1, 2021
Planning her seventeenth Armand Gamache novel, Penny realized that she couldn't ignore the pandemic, but how to write about it without rehashing the all-too-familiar horrors? Her solution was to set the story after the virus had been contained in Canada, but, as she explains in an afterword, "the bruising remained." It begins when Chief Inspector Gamache is ordered to provide security for a lecture by controversial statistics professor Abigail Robinson, who argues that further pandemics can be eliminated by a program of mandatory euthanasia targeting at-risk groups, including the elderly and the disabled. The Canadian government rejects the idea, but as Robinson speaks around the country, she begins to gain public support (along with violent opponents). When an attempt on the professor's life at the lecture Gamache is working causes a near-riot, and, later, in the wake of a related murder, Gamache realizes that "the madness of crowds" could be the most dangerous side effect of the pandemic. Always a master plotter, Penny brilliantly combines this main story line with a profusion of subplots that bring together multiple interconnected themes, all raising thought-provoking questions about ethics and human relationships in a post-COVID world. Gamache's longtime belief in our common humanity is severely tested here, but, finally, it is that belief and the actions deriving from it that seem to offer the only balm for our lingering bruises. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Millions of readers will find that picking up a new Gamache novel is the perfect way to celebrate the easing of a pandemic.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2021
Planning her seventeenth Armand Gamache novel, Penny realized that she couldn't ignore the pandemic, but how to write about it without rehashing the all-too-familiar horrors? Her solution was to set the story after the virus had been contained in Canada, but, as she explains in an afterword, "the bruising remained." It begins when Chief Inspector Gamache is ordered to provide security for a lecture by controversial statistics professor Abigail Robinson, who argues that further pandemics can be eliminated by a program of mandatory euthanasia targeting at-risk groups, including the elderly and the disabled. The Canadian government rejects the idea, but as Robinson speaks around the country, she begins to gain public support (along with violent opponents). When an attempt on the professor's life at the lecture Gamache is working causes a near-riot, and, later, in the wake of a related murder, Gamache realizes that "the madness of crowds" could be the most dangerous side effect of the pandemic. Always a master plotter, Penny brilliantly combines this main story line with a profusion of subplots that bring together multiple interconnected themes, all raising thought-provoking questions about ethics and human relationships in a post-COVID world. Gamache's longtime belief in our common humanity is severely tested here, but, finally, it is that belief and the actions deriving from it that seem to offer the only balm for our lingering bruises. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Millions of readers will find that picking up a new Gamache novel is the perfect way to celebrate the easing of a pandemic.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines, Qu�bec, emerge from the pandemic to confront something in its way even more monstrous. It's not clear entirely how the invitation was extended, but Colette Roberge, Chancellor of the Universit� de l'Estrie, is hosting her old friend professor Abigail Robinson, of the University of Western Canada, for a talk on statistics. That sounds dry until Gamache realizes that the numbers Robinson is crunching concern the benefits that would accrue around the world if the powers that be launched a wholesale campaign of mercy killing that targeted the old, the sick, and the helpless. The subject is guaranteed to polarize audiences violently even as the endorsements Robinson is seeking from politicians and other influencers approach a tipping point at which her radical ideas might seem reasonable, even tenable. The capacity crowd crammed into an old gym to hear the talk is already rowdy when someone sets off a string of firecrackers and someone fires a gun, narrowly missing the speaker. The inevitable murder that follows on the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve strikes painful chords in everyone from young Sudanese activist Haniya Daoud, whose sufferings have left her filled with rage and disdain for the human race, to Gamache's sidekick and son-in-law, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, who's coping with his complicated feelings toward his baby daughter, Idola, who was born with Down sSyndrome, to thoracic surgeon Vincent Gilbert, the Asshole Saint hiding a dark secret that portends all the other secrets Gamache must toil to uncover and determine which of them is responsible for this post-pandemic nightmare. No one balances tight plotting, compassion for her flawed characters, and a broader vision of humanity like Penny.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

Starred review from July 2, 2021

Penny's 17th entry in the "Chief Inspector Gamache" series (after All the Devils Are Here) finds the Gamache family in the Qu�bec village of Three Pines during the Christmas holidays. The threat of COVID-19 has subsided, and the villagers may gather again. Many of the village windows still display children's drawings with the words "�a va bien aller" ("All will be well"). That phrase was used as comfort during the pandemic but now it has been co-opted by statistician Abigail Robinson, who uses data to prove that better times may come, but that there will be a price. Inspector Gamache must protect Professor Robinson during her lecture, which is attended by an unstable crowd. An incident at the lecture pulls Gamache into the world of this controversial academic. As the conflict moves to Three Pines, the tension escalates, resulting in crimes that seem impossible to untangle. VERDICT This book has layers within layers: good versus evil; our duty to the weak; the nature of power; the fact that good people are not always likable, and likable people are not always good. Penny's familiar characters are back, along with some intriguing visitors. The mystery will keep readers absorbed until the end and might make them realize how this unprecedented pandemic has changed the world. Highly recommended for public libraries.--Terry Lucas, Shelter Island P.L., NY

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.