The Grey Wolf (2024)
By Louise Penny
Minotaur Books, 414 pages.
★★★
Is the Armand Gamache franchise running on fumes? The Grey Wolf, the much-anticipated 19th book of Three Pines series, shows that author Louise Penny still has tricks up her sleeve. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of recycling – especially from books six (Bury Your Dead), eight (The Beautiful Mystery), and nine (How the Light Gets In).
The Grey Wolf begins on a placid Sunday morning when the phone rings, Armand notices the number and ignores it, but when the caller is persistent, he swears into the receiver and hangs up. The central mystery begins curiously. Someone bypasses the alarm and enters Gamache’s Montreal pied-á-terre. All that is taken is a stained jacket, which is promptly sent to his office at the Sûreté du Québec with a list of spices scribbled onto a torn piece of paper in a pocket. Soon, Gamache is sitting in a café facing a nervous young man who has reason to be so.
Gamache, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Isabelle Lacoste soon find themselves embroiled in investigating multiple murders that take them from Montreal and Three Pines to Rome, France, Washington DC, and the Gaspé region of northern Québec. A monstrous plot is brewing that could kill hundreds of thousands. The problem is that none of the clues add up, the objective is vague, and Gamache is torn between warning the public–an act that would alert the terrorists–or keeping the lid on in the hope of both preventing a massacre and exposing the conspirators. If only he knew who the terrorists were and when they will strike! High government officials are probably involved, but how high and how to prove it? Who else is involved in the complex plot? The Montreal Mafia? Fanatics? Corporations? Worst of all, Gamache thinks that two of his bêtte-noires are involved: Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Dagenais and his assistant, Jeanne Caron. Dagenais harbors an old grudge. Young Gamache once arrested his daughter for DUI and refused to drop the charges. (Dagenais pulled strings to do that and subsequently made certain Gamache’s son was jailed for drugs.) Caron is both ambitious and corrupt; she and Gamache despise each other.
If you’re not following this, it means you have some reading to do to catch up, a nice way of saying The Grey Wolf is not a stand-alone mystery. Gamache has plenty of suspects for the evil black wolf, but who is the grey wolf he can trust? Aside from his inner team, that’s a short list. The Sûreté is riddled with corruption, despite Gamache’s efforts to cleanse it, and it’s possible some old friends and allies may have turned coats. Solving the threat means ferreting information from two different abbeys, interviewing three different monks and a nun, and tiptoeing around rivalries between the Gilbertines, the Carthusians, and Dominicans, the latter of Inquisition infamy. At one point a warrant is drawn, but how does one serve it in a monastery closed to outsiders and monks who have taken a vow of silence? What in the blazes does a particularly vile liqueur have to do with anything? Where are a victim’s notebooks and laptop that might tell Gamache what is about to happen and where?
As you can tell from my no-spoilers summary, The Grey Wolf has a lot going on. I am tempted to say so much so that the novel is occasionally sloppy.* As the Gamache series has progressed, Penny has opted for thriller formats that replace detective work with pick-a-number intuition. Some readers probably prefer the tension of a rush-to-avoid-Armageddon approach. Yet, it’s hard to ignore that Ms. Penny has drawn from that well before. The ripple effect is that by infusing the novels with globe-trotting plots and visits to halls of power, Penny takes us further away from Three Pines. Characters such as Clara, Myrna, Olivier, Gabri, Ruth, and Reine-Marie are mere cameos in The Grey Wolf. It is Penny’s prerogative to plot her novels as she wishes, but I miss the charm of earlier books in which cleverness solved the mystery more than guns and heart-thumping action.
The bottom line is that I liked The Grey Wolf, but I didn’t love it. I should also note that The Grey Wolf ends with a remark that assures a sequel is in the works.
Rob Weir
* Disclosure: I read an uncorrected advance copy, hence it’s possible some of the wrinkles have been ironed.
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