The Black Wolf: Thriller or Bummer?

 

 

 

THE BLACK WOLF  (2025)

By Louise Penny

Minotaur Books, 370 pages.

★★★

 

 I have a dilemma. I’m a huge Louise Penny fan who devours her work like a starving man at a banquet table. That said, objectively her work has taken a darker turn in the past few years that makes it less satisfying as it once was. I say this not as one of those rabid fans who wants every book to frolic on the green in Three Pines and whilst uttering witticisms with friends and enjoying wholesome moments in the village. I still find Penny a compelling writer, but I’m not fond of the transformation of her central character: Armand Gamache.

 

Penny’s mysteries are character-centered, but recent works have been more action-driven and violent. Gamache has become harder and cynical about most things that don’t relate to the residents of Three Pines and his immediate family. In addition, though Penny’s plots have grown more complex, the tone of her books has drifted further from the mystery category and into thriller territory. This may make them enormously popular, but I find them less likable.

 

The Black Wolf is the sequel to The Grey Wolf, which definitely should be read first. As was discovered at the end of The Grey Wolf, Gamache, his son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Isabelle Lacoste, Gamache’s post-retirement successor as head of the Sûreté du Québec, thought they had jailed the “Black” Wolf by breaking a plot to kill hundreds of thousands by poisoning Montreal’s water supply. They did so based on their reading of a notebook and piecing together evidence that allowed the investing team to stop the massacre. Upon further reflection, though, Gamache realized that the “wolf,” Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, was not the Black Wolf at all. In the Cree legend that names both books, the Black Wolf is evil and the Grey Wolf is one of kindness and compassion. Lauzon insisted he was framed and Gamache considers it a possibility. He even secures Lauzon’s temporary release from prison and brings him into his home to celebrate Christmas, though Reine-Marie is appalled for reasons beyond the fact that Lauzon is more an arrogant prig than grateful.

 

The first revelation is that another notebook exists that details an evil far worse the one Gamache, et. al. first found. That notebook, an ambiguous map, and a cryptic semi-warning of “a dry and parched land where there is no water…” leads Gamache on a mission to delay a plan that some believe is inevitable. In fact, there are those who would implement it in the name of preventing an even greater catastrophe. Herein lies a paradox; in the Cree belief system, the grey and black are equally necessary to keep the world in balance; in Gamache’s world view, the black wolf must be destroyed.

 

There is a sense in which what Penny is dealing with is more in line with a Star Trek scenario than something appropriate for a retired chief of the Sûreté. Who is the black wolf? Crime investigators are trained to pursue individuals. The Black Wolf is filled with bad actors, but who are they? Organized crime? Crooked cops? Governments? International villains? All of the preceding? The black wolf has the characteristics of a massive conspiracy that is beyond borders and beyond individuals. Who gets taken down and how does one decide? The parched land reference is from Psalm 63, but what does it mean nearly 4,000 years later?

 

Had The Black Wolf been written decades earlier, it would have been dismissed as preposterous. The “ouch” moment of the novel in 2025 is that it’s distressingly easy to imagine the events described in the novel as feasible. One hopes that they aren’t, but the immediate question is whether Ms. Penny has written one big bummer of a novel that takes Armand Gamache too far from the determined optimism of previous works. Saying more would risk spoilers, but I will note that a key moment in the book rests upon Gamache deliberately telling a lie. This violates one of his four paths to obtaining wisdom, admitting “I was wrong.”

 

A final note is that in the last two novels Canada’s Liberal Party has taken it on the chin. Does that mean anything?

 

Rob Weir