A Great Reckoning - Louise Penny

I've read all of Louise Penny's books and she never disappoints.  

Armand Gamache is now the head of the Surete Academy (there should be some accents over 'Surete' but if my lap top has them, I don't know where they are), determined to reform the way police cadets are chosen and trained.  It's a difficult job because there's been so much corruption.  He fires many of the professors and replaces them with people he knows to have integrity.  But some of his choices are questioned because they are those very corrupt people.  Gamache has his reasons.

He is also personally checking the applications to the academy, accepting most of the previously reviewed acceptances and rejections.  But when he comes to Amelia Choquet's rejected application, he reverses the decision and admits her.  She seems unsuited for the position:  pierced, tattooed, a rude street girl, who reads ancient Greek and Latin, or so she says.  Why does he seem to have a special relationship with her?  He's questioned about admitting her, but he has his reasons.

An instructor at the academy is murdered.  Gamache, Amelia, and several others are suspected.  As the case is investigated, dark secrets are revealed.  Gamache asks that a high official in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police review the investigation as an outsider since the investigation is being conducted by Isabelle Lacoste, a former member of Gamache's homicide squad and now head of that squad. 

Meanwhile, in Three Pines (where we all want to live), an old map has been found in the walls of the bistro.  It's of Three Pines, which has never shown up on any map before.  Not even now.  Gamache asks four cadets to investigate the map and find out all they can about it.  A couple of the cadets think it's busy work, a waste of time for a police officer in training.  Gamache has his reasons.

It all comes together in the end, the stories, the people, the crimes and their solutions.

And we find ourselves back in the warm circle of friends in Three Pines.

Louise Penny has written a touching Acknowledgements at the end of the book, allowing us into her personal life.  My heart goes out to her.

P.S.  As I post this, I see that there is an update to her Acknowledgements.

The Nature of the Beast - Louise Penny

I love Louise Penny because she's introduced me to wonderful, odd people and to the mythical place called Three Pines.  I wish she'd write a mystery a month.  I don't even care if there's a mystery involved.  I just want to sit in the bistro drinking with Reine-Marie, Armand, Ruth (especially Ruth!), Rosa, Clara, Myrna, and the others, basking in the warmth of the fire and in their intelligent and sometimes silly conversation, eating delicious food.

Little Laurent Lepage cries wolf.  A lot.  His imagination runs away with him.  So when he races into the village, raving about a gun he found in the woods, a gun bigger than a house, and a monster riding on the gun, no one believes him.  However, when he's found dead, apparently from a bicycle accident, retired Chief Inspector Armand Gamache feels that something isn't right.  He suggests to his protege and successor, Chief Inspector Isabelle Lacoste, that they investigate further.  Yes, Laurent was murdered.

What they find in the woods is a huge missile launcher built in the 1990s.  Called Project Babylon and decorated with the Whore of Babylon, no one was sure it had been built, although some people had been searching for it and for its plans for years.  Pointed at the east coast of the US, rumor had it that the builder was planning to sell the launcher to Saddam Hussein, but the builder was murdered.  As word gets out, Canadian intelligence agents show up.  They clash with Lacoste's group and Lacoste's group clashes with some of the local police.  Tensions and subterfuges abound.

There's another murder.  Everyone is looking for the plans for the gun and Laurent's murder is overshadowed by the search.  The intelligence people from the government, an elderly scientist who'd been involved in the project, even some of the older villagers who lived there when the gun was built are suspected.  How could they not have known what was being built in the woods?  Not everyone is who they seem to be.  Someone is hiding something.

The Nature of the Beast is the eleventh in a string of engaging and satisfying mysteries involving Gamache and the residents of Three Pines.  I've now acquired them all and hope to start at the beginning and read through to the end.  This is how the books should be read.  If you read them out of order, as I did, you'll miss the reasons for the character development.  Things happen, people change.  But I'd love to live in Three Pines.