“And through the books I think he’s somewhat unusual as a series hero in that he’s not the macho (cop). “He’s a relatively young man, he’s not even 60, and once he recovered I knew that he would have to do something,” Penny says.
In “A Great Reckoning,” Gamache is coming out of the retirement he entered after the devastating events of an early book, leaving Three Pines and the Sûreté du Québec – the provincial police force – to take over as head of the Sûreté academy, where future officers are trained and where recent leadership has done worse than simply fail to train them properly, instead actively training them to be cruel and callous. It’s also like music, Penny says after a moment’s consideration. “It’s almost like ley-lines – things come together.” So to write something that is linear, that only has one path and a fairly straight one, wouldn’t interest me very much. “But I take a year to write a book, it’s all I produce. “It is very complicated,” Penny acknowledges by phone from her home in the village of Knowlton, Quebec, where she lives with her husband, Michael Whitehead.
Then there’s the odd, old map found lost or hidden inside the walls of the bistro in the village of Three Pines, Gamache’s hometown – and what on earth could its meaning be?
A huge amount of money also has been stolen, the mastermind still somewhere in the shadows. There’s a murder, of course, the dead man so despised there’s no end of suspects to consider. So in “A Great Reckoning,” her 12th book in the series, Gamache finds himself contemplating at least three major mysteries. When Louise Penny sits down to spend another year with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the hero of her best-selling mystery series set in Quebec, it’s never enough to tell a simple story, the kind that leads from crime to comeuppance in a single straight line.
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