The Madness of Crowds

It is New Year's in Three Pines, the pandemic is receding, and Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is handed a routine assignment: security for a lecture by a visiting academic at the local university.

When he reads what Professor Abigail Robinson actually intends to say — a statistician's case, delivered with warmth and reason, for a policy no decent society should tolerate — he tries to have the event cancelled. He is overruled. The lecture goes ahead, the hall is full, and the applause is the most frightening thing in the book.

Then there is a murder. The Madness of Crowds is the seventeenth Chief Inspector Gamache novel, and Penny's most direct: about how quickly a reasonable-sounding voice can find a crowd, and how little separates a community from a mob.