The Madness of Crowds: A Novel (Chief Inspector Gamache Novel, 17) Paperback – May 24, 2022

The problem with reading a Louise Penny book is that they are so good! So good that everything else that you read within a close time frame will seem thin and pale in comparison. Her characters are complicated and three-dimensional. You cannot read one of her books without gaining more insight into human nature at its best, its worst, and everything in between. Her plots are complex and filled with thoughtful discussions of important contemporary issues. This book is no exception. The reader is never bogged down in superfluous information, nor will the reader feel a preachy or condescending tone. Her books value morality and goodness at their core, but they are never, ever remotely sappy. Few authors can manage even part of these tasks and Louise Penny has master them all. Most of the story is set in the fictional small town of Three Pines and its surroundings. No surprise, the setting in her books is also always rich and detailed. Being in Three Pines means that many of the continuing characters appear and that is a plus. There are issues dealing with the pandemic, free speech, euthanasia, eugenics, and heroics in the face of terrible abuse. The issues are serious, and they are dealt with in a thoughtful manner, but the book is never ponderous or depressing. This series is one that should be read in order so that you can better know the characters. There will be no summary of the story here, because Louise Penny can tell her story much better than I can.

I’ve been wrapped in a Three Pines binge since the beginning of summer and this is one of the best. I will warn other readers that these should probably be read in sequence, as past episodes appear.

A new Inspector Armand Gamache mystery novel by Louise Penny is an event. Each story generally goes right to the top of the bestsellers’ lists, and with good reason. Gamache, his Quebec Surete colleagues, and his neighbors in the village of three Pines have legions of fans worldwide. And his fans have followed Gamache through thick and thin, from Montreal to Paris, from his unmasking political skullduggery at the highest levels of Canadian provincial government to his nearly dying.We love Gamache and how he solves mysteries. We love his colleagues Isabel Lacoste and Jean-guy Beauvoir, who also happens to be his son-in-law. We love Gamache’s wife, Reine-Narie. And the Three Pines neighbors: bistro owners Olivier and Gabri, poet Ruth Zardo and her foul-mouthed duck Rosa, artist Clare Morrow, and bookstore operator Myrna.“The Madness of Crowds” is the seventeenth Gamache novel, and it helps to know two things about the book. It was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was written before the emergence of the delta variant of COVID. It is set just after the pandemic has ended, with the widespread availability of vaccines. The people are Three Pines are coming together for a Christmas and New Year’s celebration, the first such celebration post-pandemic.Joining the celebration is a Sudanese woman nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, one who endured mass rape, torture, and disfigurement to go on to create a foundation for women and children. She is a worldwide celebrity, and the residents of Three Pines are initially thrilled. Until they get to know her, and discover that sainthood often involves a brutal, caustic personality.Gamache is called to a local university, to provide security for a speaker with unpopular views, in this case, the articulation of support for eugenics and the “culling” of the population, particularly during events like pandemics. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, eugenics was especially popular in the late nineteenth and first-half of the twentieth centuries. In the United States, it was associated with Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. In Europe, it was associated with Nazi theories of racial superiority, and it was the Holocaust that dealt what many thought was a death blow to eugenics. Biotechnology, however, has brought it back, although in a different form and using different names.It is a woman professor from British Columbia whom Gamache must protect, even as he finds what she says and believes to be abhorrent. Contributing to this abhorrence is that fact that Gamache’s baby granddaughter Idola, the child of Jean-Guy and Gamache’s daughter Annie, has Down’s Syndrome.Penny swirls all these currents and crosscurrents together, in the way only she can, to tell a fascinating story. Except something seems slightly off-kilter in The Madness of Crowds, and it’s not easy to say specifically what it is. It may be the disconnect of writing about a pandemic that has supposedly just passed, when the reader’s current reality is that COVID-19 is still very much with us. It may be that it takes several chapters before the reader knows what, exactly, are the controversial views the characters find to be so hateful. It may be that the murder, when it does finally occur well into the story, is connected to human experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. Using these experiments, the question of eugenics, and Sudanese atrocities as narrative devices in the novel runs the risk of a story without a center, and the book comes close to that.There’s also a sense that the author did not deal well with what happened during the first year of COVID-19, and it surfaces several times in the experiences of her characters. It is Gamache’s wife who tell us what happened to her husband and son-in-law during the lockdown; Gamache and Jean-Guy make little reference to it.I love the Gamache stories. I’ve been amazed with the first 16 books and how Penny consistently wrote on exceptional mystery novel after another. “The Madness of Crowds” is a good story, but it might have needed a simpler plot line; the story of the Sudanese woman, for example, could have been a separate Gamache story all to itself.But we remain faithful to the inspector, his colleagues, his family, and his friends.

And she throws in a wonderful murder mystery and terrific characters to move you and help one think through the thorny issues we must actually think about. I started with the book before this one. I then read them all in order to I just can’t wait til I’m old enough to forget them so I can do it all over again.I’m not sure all will be well but I’m sure that I cannot live without the hope for that. Thank you.

So very touching and heart rendering, so much to enjoy and understand but so worth the trip to Three Pines. I cannot love this series or these people anymore than I do, but somehow I manage.

Another in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series in which the covid pandemic plays and outsized role, even as it has been bypassed by the survivors who must now deal with the fallout of lost friends and relatives and changes in societal values that threaten to be even worse than the pandemic itself.As if that isn't bad enough, Armand must now unravel the threads that emerge from the body of a young woman, found in the snow by frolicking teens on New Years' Eve. Is it really linked to a years-old death of both a young child and her parents? And if it isn't linked, why must he try to figure out what killed them as well. After all, the coroners' reports suggest suicide in two of the cases, but what do those petechiae in the child's eyes really point to and who might have caused them?Another winning mystery slowly but surely solved.

4.5 stars Whenever a new book by Louise Penny is published, it immediately goes to the top of my reading list. Set in the idyllic, charming village of Three Pines, Quebec, Penny has designed a place where I want to live. I want to get to know the people in this community and to eat in the Bistro. Her characters are so well developed that they seem real, and with each book, we get to know them better; their kindness, their foibles and quirks, their place in the village, and their relationships with neighbors and friends. In many ways, this is the best and most powerful book in the series. It is deep, dark, and provocative.There are moral dilemmas and ethical discussions and much food for thought. There is a murder, of course, amongst the sparkling winter landscape, hot chocolate, and outdoor activities with the children playing in the snow. After a long time following COVID restrictions, the villagers have come out of isolation, delighted that the vaccine has ended the pandemic. They are now free to congregate, hug, discard masks, and resume a normal life, but the pandemic has left them with grief and lingering sadness. This post-COVID setting is a little too soon while we are still in the midst of the 4th wave in most places, even when fully vaccinated. I felt the plot became convoluted when possible motives, opportunities, and suspects were discussed and with the added inclusion of a killing long in the past. These theories seemed to be contemplated repeatedly to the point of tedium but gave the reader a puzzle to ponder. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is back. He is Head of Homicide for the Surete de Quebec. Team members Isabelle and Jean-Guy, his son-in-law, are also involved in the investigations. The Gamache family now has several grandchildren. Fellow villagers, like the artist Claire, Myrna, who runs a bookstore, Gabe and Olivier, managers of the Bistro (shut down during the pandemic), are now busy and open for business. It was great to be reacquainted with the elderly, foul-mouthed, eccentric poet Ruth with her pet duck. She is much more insightful than people believe. There are three visitors to Three Pines. Do they have hidden agendas? Why are they there in the dead of winter? Gamache has been requested to provide security at a lecture for a visiting statistician, Abigal Robinson. He feels that there will be little attendance in a small nearby University in the dead of winter and that statistics are not a stimulating subject. However, he learns that she holds abhorrent conclusions and that many are traveling in to hear her speech. She is personally charming, but her views are dangerous and morally repellent. Gamache tries to have the lecture canceled but is unsuccessful. Gamache is haunted by a scene he witnessed in a nursing home where the elderly were neglected and left to die. Based on her research to be presented to the Quebec Premier on how COVID had dire effects on health care and the economy, Abigal is advocating forced euthanasia on the elderly and disabled. Shots are fired at the lecture, and chaos results. Abigal is visiting with her friend and assistant. The other newcomer is Haniya Daoud, a young Nobel Peace Prize nominee from Sudan. She has experienced the most horrible, nightmarish torture before her escape to freedom. Living in an isolated cabin in the woods is a professor who, as a young doctor, participated in some factual and dreadful mind-altering experiments at McGill University on behalf of the CIA. He knew what was happening but kept quiet about it. These left many of the subjects damaged for life. He keeps this part of his life secret but is unpopular as he did nothing to help the community during the COVID lockdown. On New Year's eve, there is a murder in a nearby wooded area while most villagers enjoyed a party. An intelligent and empathetic Gamache and his team must question the possible suspects and figure out the killer's motive. This turns out to be a very complex and difficult investigation and asks if a murder can be motivated by love as well as hate. Can there ever be a justification for killing? This was an enthralling, thought-provoking novel involving the reader's emotions with some tear-jerking moments and surprising twists and revelations, tension and suspense, a difficult puzzle, and captivating characters.

Great read

So now after seventeen novels there is just the last one to go! I am so fond of all the characters who I now feel I know so well .The great skill, apart from skilful storytelling that gives a sense that you are in the room with the characters , is the plot . Themes that reflect important issues of the day , moral questions run throughout about how to deal with them in a way that does not compromise the values of our heroes . We are constantly asking ourselves what would we do as we wonder right up to the end , who is guilty ?

Very well written + impossible to put down +f ood for thougt

As always Chief Inspector Gamache never lets you down. Incredible plot that grips you through the end.