Review: "The Black Wolf" Louise Penny

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By Paul Carrier

Louise Penny’s Québec-based mystery series — 20 novels and counting — has always featured a recurring cast of characters led by Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force in that Canadian province.

Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, live in the charming village of Three Pines, which has its share of quirky characters, including a famous but cranky poet and her pet duck, Rosa. The colorful locals return from one book to the next, but almost all of the novels have stand-alone plots involving investigations of all-new dastardly doings in Three Pines or elsewhere in Québec.

Now some of that has changed. The Black Wolf, released this year as the latest entry in the series, picks up where its immediate predecessor, The Gray Wolf, left off, providing an unusual example of plotting continuity from one novel to the next.

The Grey Wolf closed with the Sûreté thwarting a domestic terrorism plot to kill untold thousands by poisoning Montréal’s water supply. The Black Wolf opens with Ganache, who heads the homicide division of the Sûreté, fearing that the failed poisoning plot was only the first phase of a two-pronged assault, the second part of which has yet to materialize.

Penny weaves a suspenseful tale, initially with plenty of unanswered questions that leave Ganache — and the reader — struggling to figure out what’s going on.

Is Gamache right in assuming that the poisoning scheme was designed to deflect attention from an even more heinous act that may loom on the horizon? 

Why does a map prepared by Charles Langlois, a biologist who tipped off police to the original threat and was then murdered in a mob hit, show a doted line running from Québec into a town in Vermont that houses a commando training center?

How did Frederick Castonguay, a childhood friend of Langlois, end up buried in a shallow grave on the shore of a remote lake in northern Québec that Langlois had visited shortly before his death?

Why does Marcus Lauzon, the disgraced former deputy prime minister of Canada, who has been convicted and imprisoned as the mastermind behind the first terrorist attack, insist that he’s been framed? Lauzon claims the real culprit is someone even higher up in the government: James Woodford, the prime minister of Canada.

And what about Evelyn Tardiff? She’s the head of the unit within the Sûreté whose task is fighting organized crime, but she has been seen at an outdoor market in Montréal chatting with a crime boss. Is she a turncoat who’s working for the mob? Or has she deceived an overly trusting criminal to help her do her job in the Sûreté?

It soon becomes clear that Québec, and indeed Canada as a whole, face what may be an existential threat. The looming crisis sounds far-fetched, but also frighteningly plausible in light of recent real-world events.

Penny does a masterful job of keeping readers guessing as we try to differentiate between the good guys and the bad. I know I mistook white hats for black ones, and vice versa.

As the plot builds to a climax, Penny ratchets up the tension with quick scene changes, introducing and updating events that are underway simultaneously, or nearly so, in multiple locations. A page-turner like this makes a reader grateful for the security and camaraderie of Three Pines, even if the village is, after all, purely fictional.