“Three Pines is not a place, it is a state of mind. Anyone who has ever spoken to Louise Penny has heard her say these words. Anyone who has read it knows how true they are.
We feel good in this village in the Eastern Townships which is not on any map and whose inhabitants are welcoming like the owners of the bistro, colorful like Clara’s canvases and, when we take them the wrong way, slobbery like Ruth, the poet.
This is where Chief Inspector Armand Gamache lives and often investigates. Last year, however, the author tore it from her beloved village for, the time of All the devils are here, transplant it to Paris. Despite a solid narrative, the book had not rallied the diehards for whom Gamache rhymes with Three Pines.
With The madness of the crowds, 17e tome of the series, the police officer is back home, in post-pandemic times and during the holidays. What more ?
Among other things, more plausibility and less digressions.
Let’s start with the beginning. During his end-of-year vacation, Gamache, yet head of homicides for the Sûreté du Québec, is strangely assigned to ensure the safety of a statistics professor who came to give a conference at the university… during the holiday season.
According to this scholar, the numbers have spoken. She knows how to forever avoid the massacres seen in the first wave of COVID, and even how to turn around economies damaged by the pandemic.
Dark figures in history have already advocated similar ideas. The reader will therefore quickly guess what it is, but will have to wait 60 pages before the novelist drops the piece, as if it were a revelation.
During the famous conference, someone will try to kill the statistician beloved by some, hated by others and, later, a murder will occur. Investigation so there will be. It will be led by Gamache and his troops, and it will consist mainly of endless exchanges. They develop theories, go back in time, correct the situation. And speak and repeat themselves over and over again.
And there is Reine-Marie, hired to sort through documents that belonged to a recently deceased woman, in which she finds… monkeys in all possible forms. Drawings. Pictures. Figures. Could it be that, by chance, the primates have something to do with Gamache’s investigation? To ask the question, is to answer it.
Despite everything and thankfully, Louise Penny’s signature emerges in the inner debates that tear the characters apart, in the gap that exists between what they say and what they really mean, in relevant reflections regarding, this time, the freedom of education and how ideas (especially bad ones) can infect the world.
We then find the essence of this genre all its own, which could be described as a humanist detective story. There it is, the Three Pines state of mind. And it feels good there.