A Great Reckoning (2016) By Louise Penny

 

I have heard my niece talk about Louise Penny, an author I was not familiar with despite her appearances on the New York Times Best Seller List on multiple occasions. She is a mystery writer in Canada. So, when I came across A Great Reckoning at book fair last summer, I bought it.

After reading A Great Reckoning, I discovered it is book 12 of a 21- book series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. However, it reads comfortably as a stand-alone novel.

Gamache had been the head of Homicide at the Sûreté du Québec in Montreal – the provincial police département. In retirement, Gamache was living a quiet life in the rural Village of Three Pines, when he was asked to return to active service and take charge of the scandal plagued police training Academy where he had trained at the beginning of his career years ago. Feeling it a duty to help right the situation, he reluctantly agrees.

The challenges at the Academy include professors and their egos, cadets and their ambitions, and a need for a major restructuring and restaffing of the training program, not all of which would be received favorably. Add to that agenda a murder, and you have a mystery. The structure of the Academy reminds me -- in a good way -- of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series.

While most of the story is set at the Academy, a significant portion of it take places in Three Pines, the town where Gamache and his wife live. It is a picturesque, mostly forgotten little village with an old restaurant/bistro; an all but abandoned Catholic Church; and several loveable, yet weird, neighbors (who I suspect are regulars in the full series).

When the owners of the bistro were renovating, they discovered an old map caught inside one of the original walls. The map will become an essential element of the story. The map subplot also provides an interesting history of map making.

Recommendation:  Yes. I will at some point read Book One. As for the other twenty, we will see.