The Grey Wolf: The Three Pines community faces a deadly case in this unforgettable and timely thriller

This book is the latest in the Louise Penny series featuring the Canadian Chief Inspector Gamache. It never fails that she leads you along a thrilling saga of good and evil fighting it out bare knuckles to gain supremacy. The small mysterious village of Three Pines with all it's eccentric inhabitants is the home and sanctuary for Gamache in his life long fight to protect his home, his country and the world from the evil that is taking place in the world. His main task, as he sees it, is to clean the police services of ccorruption and greed while solving crimes he faces in every day Quebec province.
The Grey Wolf brings back into play crimes from several of his past that are intertwined with a major incident of present. Indeed this stunning crime has the potential to effect people everywhere, especially those he loves dearly.
In the Cree culture there is an analogy of this power struggle. Inside each of us resides a grey wolf who represents good and a black wolf who represents evil. Each day they struggle to control you and your actions. The one that is stronger and wins is the one that you feed with you thoughts and actions.
I have read all her books. They are all entertaining with amazingly weird and wonderful characters. They are also thought provoking and lessons in morals and ethics.
I would recommend this book to anyone.

This is Book 19 in Louise Penny’s series about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of homicide for the Sûreté du Quebec, Canada. Down the years the books have introduced lots of eccentric characters, who still feature, but the overarching themes of each mystery are politics and corruption. Gamache has been fighting both since Book 1, often with dreadful consequences for himself.

The Grey Wolf begins with Gamache receiving a phone call on his personal phone on a Sunday morning. The call enrages him, but it’s only the first of several small but very strange events over the next few days, which end with a murder being committed before his eyes. In the aftermath of that killing, he and his team come to realise it’s part of a sinister conspiracy which could result in the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

Because of what they’ve discovered, Gamache knows there must be senior political and police figures involved, but of course he doesn’t know which or who. And as the story moves across Canada, into the USA and then to France it’s essential his investigation stays under the radar, because if the conspirators realise the police are onto them, they will either bring things forward or delay until everyone’s guard is down again. The tension builds slowly towards an action-packed conclusion, with all sorts of different twists and shocks for the reader to contend with in the last hundred-plus pages or so.

My verdict
I’ve read all the Gamache novels and enjoy them very much, so it’s not possible to give an entirely objective verdict. But there are sound reasons why I think these books are good.

First, Louise Penny’s writing is elegant and smooth. Reviewers often compare her to Donna Leon and there are definitely similarities in style, although Donna Leon’s Brunetti mysteries rarely move beyond Venice, while Penny’s stories quite often tackle global issues. But the writing of both these authors is easy and relaxed, which makes reading their novels very enjoyable.

Second, Armand Gamache is an interesting protagonist. Like Leon’s Brunetti, he’s an erudite, thoughtful character who prefers to work the clues rather than reach for a gun. An English comparison might be P.D. James’s Adam Dalgleish. There are never any huge leaps of inspiration to jolt the plot forward. You might feel that Gamache has guessed much more than he lets on, but the fences are never rushed, you just sail over them.

Louise Penny also does sinister well. The reader knows Gamache is up against corruption at very high levels but you can never be sure who the bad apple is, and sometimes when you find out, it’s a huge surprise. But the corruption is always there, bubbling away in the background and you can’t ignore the tension it adds.

This novel doesn’t spend much time in the village of Three Pines, so the eccentric characters I referred to earlier don’t play a big part. For me that was a relief. Over the years I’ve come to find many of them irritating and predictable, where once they added a bit of fun. I enjoyed the fact that the plot of this was played out on a bigger stage without those distractions.

The end of this story is exciting and, as I said, action-packed. It also leaves you knowing there’s will be another instalment. The next book – The Black Wolf – is to be published this October and I’m looking forward to reading that.
Review by: Cornish Eskimo, Oundle Crime