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...
The Madness of Crowds
The Madness of Crowds
Synopsis
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.
Vibe
Genres
Characters
Armand GamacheProtagonist
Chief Inspector of homicide, forced to protect a speaker whose argument he finds monstrous.
Abigail RobinsonAntagonist
A statistics professor whose data-driven lecture gathers a dangerous following.
Jean-Guy BeauvoirSupporting
Gamache's son-in-law and second-in-command, back from Paris.
Reine-Marie GamacheSupporting
Gamache's wife.
Ruth ZardoSupporting
The village poet.
