By Paul Carrier
Armand Gamache — well-educated, principled, and a highly skilled detective — has gone through several professional incarnations in Louise Penny’s 12 previous novels. Top homicide cop. Early (but short-lived) retiree. Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec’s training academy.
Now, in Penny’s 13th outing, Gamache has reached the pinnacle of his career, as chief superintendent of the Sûreté. That places him in command of the entire provincial police force in predominantly French-speaking Québec, a geographically massive Canadian province of eight million people.
Having ferreted out corruption within the Sûreté and survived ruthless attempts to destroy him, Gamache has decided he must gamble everything on reinventing the agency. His goal is to make it strong enough to fight a rising wave of crime by demolishing the province’s premier drug cartel, in the belief that most crime has its roots in drug abuse.
But as Gamache and his team prepare to deliver a death blow to Québec’s biggest drug lord, a painful decision arises during a trial. As a witness, Gamache must choose between testifying truthfully, which would destroy the Sûreté’s one shot at neutralizing the narcotics kingpin, or lying under oath to avoid tipping off the trafficker to the looming crackdown.
If readers have learned anything about Armand Gamache from Penny’s novels it’s that he plays everything by the book. So the possibility that he will perjure himself, or allow a large drug shipment to cross from Québec into the United States to lure the cartel into believing the Sûreté is incompetent, is a stunning turn of events.
As Gamache says at one point, quoting Mahatma Gandhi: "There is a higher court than the courts of justice and that is the court of conscience.”
Conscience figures prominently in Glass Houses, which focuses in part on a murder that occurs in the tiny (and fictional) village of Three Pines, south of Montréal. That is where Ganache and his wife, Reine-Marie, live, and it is where a visitor to the village is killed, shortly after a cobrador appears on the village green.
A what?
The cobrador is a real-life, costumed debt collector who stalks deadbeats in contemporary Spain, to shame them into paying their bills. But the cloaked, hooded, masked cobrador who turns up in Three Pines harkens back to medieval times. (Today's Spanish cobrador is real, but Penny admits to having created the older version.) As portrayed in the novel, the earlier cobradors collected moral debts rather than financial ones. The ancient cobrador acted as a conscience, holding people accountable for grave moral infractions for which they have not atoned. That seems to be what is happening in Three Pines. But who is the cobrador? And who is the target?
When the cobrador eventually disappears, Katie Evans, an architect from Montréal, is found murdered in a church basement. Evans is dressed as the mysterious “conscience,” so was she the cobrador? Perhaps the cobrador is still at large, having murdered Evans. But if Evans was not the cobrador, why is she found wearing the cobrador’s costume? Is it possible that the cobrador, too, has been killed but its body has yet to be found? Maybe someone else, a third party, is responsible for not one but two murders.
Penny weaves her way through all of this with great finesse. Even after a suspect has been placed on trial, the reader does not immediately learn the defendant's identity, as the novel slips back and forth in time between the killing and the subsequent trial. Nor is it immediately clear how the trial and the Sûreté’s plan to destroy Québec’s most powerful trafficker are linked, adding to the suspense as a showdown looms between cops and cartel.
The author is a gifted storyteller, not least because she leavens her narrative with a hallmark of this series: the levity and wit of a recurring cast of characters from Three Pines. The ensemble includes the wise but acerbic poet Ruth, who makes her rounds carrying a pet duck named Rosa; famed artist Clara; therapist turned bookstore owner Myrna; and Gabri and Olivier, the gay couple who run the local bistro and the village’s bed and breakfast.
The Gamache novels, by no means devoid of evil, are best-known for Penny’s emphasis on decency, friendship and psychological insight, all of it delivered in her trademark lyrical style. Glass Houses, with its intricate plot, continues that tradition, and ends with a cliff-hanger that practically screams “sequel.” Which is a very good thing indeed.
Now, in Penny’s 13th outing, Gamache has reached the pinnacle of his career, as chief superintendent of the Sûreté. That places him in command of the entire provincial police force in predominantly French-speaking Québec, a geographically massive Canadian province of eight million people.
Having ferreted out corruption within the Sûreté and survived ruthless attempts to destroy him, Gamache has decided he must gamble everything on reinventing the agency. His goal is to make it strong enough to fight a rising wave of crime by demolishing the province’s premier drug cartel, in the belief that most crime has its roots in drug abuse.
But as Gamache and his team prepare to deliver a death blow to Québec’s biggest drug lord, a painful decision arises during a trial. As a witness, Gamache must choose between testifying truthfully, which would destroy the Sûreté’s one shot at neutralizing the narcotics kingpin, or lying under oath to avoid tipping off the trafficker to the looming crackdown.
If readers have learned anything about Armand Gamache from Penny’s novels it’s that he plays everything by the book. So the possibility that he will perjure himself, or allow a large drug shipment to cross from Québec into the United States to lure the cartel into believing the Sûreté is incompetent, is a stunning turn of events.
As Gamache says at one point, quoting Mahatma Gandhi: "There is a higher court than the courts of justice and that is the court of conscience.”
Conscience figures prominently in Glass Houses, which focuses in part on a murder that occurs in the tiny (and fictional) village of Three Pines, south of Montréal. That is where Ganache and his wife, Reine-Marie, live, and it is where a visitor to the village is killed, shortly after a cobrador appears on the village green.
A what?
The cobrador is a real-life, costumed debt collector who stalks deadbeats in contemporary Spain, to shame them into paying their bills. But the cloaked, hooded, masked cobrador who turns up in Three Pines harkens back to medieval times. (Today's Spanish cobrador is real, but Penny admits to having created the older version.) As portrayed in the novel, the earlier cobradors collected moral debts rather than financial ones. The ancient cobrador acted as a conscience, holding people accountable for grave moral infractions for which they have not atoned. That seems to be what is happening in Three Pines. But who is the cobrador? And who is the target?
When the cobrador eventually disappears, Katie Evans, an architect from Montréal, is found murdered in a church basement. Evans is dressed as the mysterious “conscience,” so was she the cobrador? Perhaps the cobrador is still at large, having murdered Evans. But if Evans was not the cobrador, why is she found wearing the cobrador’s costume? Is it possible that the cobrador, too, has been killed but its body has yet to be found? Maybe someone else, a third party, is responsible for not one but two murders.
Penny weaves her way through all of this with great finesse. Even after a suspect has been placed on trial, the reader does not immediately learn the defendant's identity, as the novel slips back and forth in time between the killing and the subsequent trial. Nor is it immediately clear how the trial and the Sûreté’s plan to destroy Québec’s most powerful trafficker are linked, adding to the suspense as a showdown looms between cops and cartel.
The author is a gifted storyteller, not least because she leavens her narrative with a hallmark of this series: the levity and wit of a recurring cast of characters from Three Pines. The ensemble includes the wise but acerbic poet Ruth, who makes her rounds carrying a pet duck named Rosa; famed artist Clara; therapist turned bookstore owner Myrna; and Gabri and Olivier, the gay couple who run the local bistro and the village’s bed and breakfast.
The Gamache novels, by no means devoid of evil, are best-known for Penny’s emphasis on decency, friendship and psychological insight, all of it delivered in her trademark lyrical style. Glass Houses, with its intricate plot, continues that tradition, and ends with a cliff-hanger that practically screams “sequel.” Which is a very good thing indeed.
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