And we then jump back and forth from the past and present to the case that brought Gamache and Jean Guy together. Jess and Pete and their two young children leave London for a new life in a huge, rambling old Suffolk house, but Jess feels uncomfortable and isolated almost from the start. I always appreciate the poetry sprinkled throughout the series, and the dialogue between our various Three Pines friends is often funny and witty.

Woven into that story is another flashback, to Gamache’s experiences on the day of the real-life mass shooting in 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, where a man with a gun slaughtered 14 women, most of them engineering students at the university, and injured another 14 people. Gamache and Beauvoir’s memories of that tragic case, the one that first brought them together, come rushing back. The novel explains her decision to betray and then to help rescue Gamache in a throwaway line about having crossed too many lines. At one point, reading in bed late at night, my mouth watering over the wild mushroom ravioli with sage brown butter, relishing a look back at the early days between Jean-Guy and his patron, my heart is racing a bit at developing events, my brain wondering how much further to go. Fiona Arsenault, a recent graduate of an engineering program, thinks that there might be an additional room into which the loft could be expanded.Armand Gamache has long been a paragon of integrity, but here Penny digs in and finds one of his faults and explores that fault, which is at the center of this story.

None of this is known to the inhabitants of Three Pines including Ruth, Clara, Billy, Gabri and Oliver. As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. Setting aside the absurdity of magical incantations, Harriet marshaled her rational self and entered the day.Gamache believes the painting is a death threat from Fleming, but the killer's been incarcerated for years. There is something rotten here, but Jude, spiralling into exhaustion and disaster, can’t pinpoint where it is: “Time was no longer a river carrying her forward but a thick sludge. Alert to the atmosphere of place and the saving grace of poetry, Gamache also trusts his gut when it comes to the presence of more malevolent forces. He secretly escapes, though, and as Gamache learns this, he becomes increasingly afraid that Fleming is coming after him and his beloved family. It is a place of comfort, at times, and also a place of uncertainty as the world wedges itself tightly intruding along those familiar streets.