The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny

The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns to Three Pines in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny's latest spellbinding novel, The Madness of Crowds.

You're a coward.

Time and again, as the New Year approaches, that charge is leveled against Armand Gamache.

It starts innocently enough.

While the residents of the Québec village of Three Pines take advantage of the deep snow to ski and toboggan, to drink hot chocolate in the bistro and share meals together, the Chief Inspector finds his holiday with his family interrupted by a simple request.

He's asked to provide security for what promises to be a non-event. A visiting Professor of Statistics will be giving a lecture at the nearby university.

While he is perplexed as to why the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec would be assigned this task, it sounds easy enough. That is until Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture.

They refuse, citing academic freedom, and accuse Gamache of censorship and intellectual cowardice. Before long, Professor Robinson's views start seeping into conversations. Spreading and infecting. So that truth and fact, reality and delusion are so confused it's near impossible to tell them apart.

Discussions become debates, debates become arguments, which turn into fights. As sides are declared, a madness takes hold.

Abigail Robinson promises that, if they follow her, ça va bien aller. All will be well. But not, Gamache and his team know, for everyone.

When a murder is committed it falls to Armand Gamache, his second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and their team to investigate the crime as well as this extraordinary popular delusion.

And the madness of crowds.

LOUISE PENNY is the bestselling author of seven previous novels featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, including the New York Times and Globe and Mail bestsellers. Still Life, her debut novel, earned the John Creasey Dagger, as well as the Arthur Ellis, Barry, Anthony, and Dilys Awards, and was voted one of Deadly Pleasures magazine's top five mystery/crime novels of the decade. Penny was the first novelist to win the Agatha Award for Best Novel four times: for A Fatal Grace, The Cruelest Month, and The Brutal Telling (all of which also won the Anthony Award for Best Novel), and for Bury Your Dead (which won the Dilys, Arthur Ellis, Anthony, Macavity, and Nero Awards).