Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Gamache)

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Benedict Pouliot, another executor for Bertha’s will, understood that Bertha wanted the house where her children had grown up demolished so they would move forward with their lives. While hiding his own rapidly deteriorating eyesight, a detective investigates the murder of black youth leader. When they get up the next morning, Benedict is gone from the Gamaches’ house, and never came home the night before. When Armand Gamache receives a letter inviting him to an abandoned farmhouse outside of Three Pines, the former head of the Sûreté du Québec discovers that a complete stranger has named him as an executor of her will. Tony, their boss, was alternating between asking them if they’d found it yet and telling the head of operations that the admin IT team was doing a great job and to get out of their faces and let them work.

She thought he was going to say something dismissive, but after a moment he said, “Well, then, what parts of it would be voluntary? A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Jean-Guy heads to meet Anthony’s boss, who is shocked to see the falsified statements that seem to indicate that Anthony had stolen millions of dollars from clients. They find and, after a harrowing further collapse, manage to rescue Benedict, but not before they discover that someone else had been there, dead in the rubble. Amelia survives and is taken to the hospital, while Beauvoir and Gamache head to Isabelle’s to see the little girl, then to the hospital to see Amelia.

At first, we were not sure there would be a new installment as Louise Penny suffered the loss of her dear husband. This starts as a small-town mystery and becomes something grander and more frightening; Penny has upped her thrills-to–pain au chocolat ratio. Gamache was named as an executor in the will of Bertha Baumgartner, a will in which she left money and a title she did not have to her children. I tried the audio of Still Life a couple years ago and thought it was super slow so gave up, thinking the series wasn’t for me.

However she surprised publishers and fans by writing in spite of her grief and found joy in the process. Gamache administers naloxone, then starts CPR, as Beauvoir shoots and kills a young man aiming at them. Although the middle bogged down a bit, the ending was tension filled and contained a couple of plot twists (one of which I predicted). We empathize with Gamache and his desperation to find the lethal drugs that went missing at the end of the last story. Books take us to places we’ve never been, they teach us about our world, and they help us to understand human experience.

He wrote his first book 'Expiation' in 1887 and in 1898 he published 'The Mysterious Mr Sabin', which he described as "The first of my long series of stories dealing with that shadowy and mysterious world of diplomacy.

Above all, he’s a kind and compassionate person, always looking out for the vulnerable and watching out for the innocent and unprotected. As she looks, she awakes from having passed out with a strange Sharpie inscription on her arm, “David 1/4. Blockbuster bestselling author Louise Penny keeps readers eyes’ glued to the page in Kingdom of the Blind, an “intriguing…and satisfying” ( Publishers Weekly) novel about everyday life and ever-curious death in the village of Three Pines. The idea that Damien came up with was to feed it information in a way that it could recognize was a pattern, but that wasn’t a pattern it expected. But Gamache and Corc O’Connor, those guys I’d like to have dinner with as well as following their literary adventures).Instead he’s fighting off pressure from politicians and slimy superiors at the Surete to betray Gamache by signing a statement that attests to Gamache’s recklessness in allowing the opioids to be dispersed. Seems like a perfectly lucky time for her…but hell, I’ll publish Louise Penny any day of the year she wants. Still on suspension, and frankly curious, Gamache accepts and soon learns that the other two executors are Myrna Landers, the bookseller from Three Pines, and a young builder.