A Better Man

Armand Gamache returns to the Sûreté du Québec demoted, sharing command of homicide with Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and walks into a province on the edge of catastrophe: the rivers are rising, the ice dams are holding back a flood that could take whole towns, and a social media campaign is calling for his head.

Into this comes Vivienne Godin's father, who is certain his pregnant daughter is dead and that her husband did it. Gamache takes the case. As the water rises, so does the pressure — and when a body is finally recovered, Gamache is left with a question he cannot answer as a policeman: what would you do if your child's killer walked free?

A Better Man is the fifteenth Chief Inspector Gamache novel — the most claustrophobic and the angriest, and one in which the reader is invited, uncomfortably, to want the wrong thing.