A Trick of the Light

Clara Morrow has finally had her solo show at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal, and the party afterwards in Three Pines is the happiest night of her life. In the morning, a woman is found dead among the bleeding hearts and lilacs in her garden.

The dead woman is Lillian Dyson — once Clara's closest friend, later the critic whose review nearly ended her career. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team follow the case into Montreal's art world, a place of patrons, dealers and rivals where praise and malice are difficult to tell apart, and where almost everyone had reason to resent Lillian.

A Trick of the Light is the seventh Chief Inspector Gamache novel. It is a book about forgiveness and its limits — about what people are willing to do to be seen, and how easily a thing can look like one shape in the light and another in the dark.