Louise Penny is a Canadian crime novelist, born in Toronto in 1958. She spent eighteen years as a radio host and journalist with the CBC before leaving in 1996 to write fiction. Her debut, Still Life, introduced Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and won the Arthur Ellis, Anthony, Barry and Dilys awards for best first novel. The Gamache books are set largely in Three Pines, a fictional Quebec village, and have since won multiple Agatha and Anthony awards. In 2021 she co-wrote...
A Great Reckoning
A Great Reckoning
Synopsis
Armand Gamache comes out of retirement to take command of the Sûreté du Québec training academy, an institution rotten enough that its graduates have poisoned the force for a generation. He keeps the worst of the old guard on staff, including Professor Serge Leduc, because he intends to watch them.
When Leduc is found shot dead in his rooms, four cadets are implicated — and each of them, along with Gamache himself, was given a copy of a strange old map of Three Pines. Gamache, who put the map into their hands, is now a suspect in a murder he is expected to solve.
A Great Reckoning is the twelfth Chief Inspector Gamache novel. It follows the map back into the First World War and forward into the question the academy poses: whether a young person handed power can be taught to be decent, and what it costs the teacher to find out.
Vibe
Genres
Characters
Armand GamacheProtagonist
New commander of the Sûreté academy, and a suspect in the murder of one of his own professors.
Serge LeducAntagonist
The academy's brutal second-in-command, found murdered in his rooms.
Amelia ChoquetSupporting
A tattooed, guarded cadet with a hidden connection to the dead instructor — and to Gamache.
Jean-Guy BeauvoirSupporting
Gamache's son-in-law and former second-in-command.
Reine-Marie GamacheSupporting
Gamache's wife.
