Murder is the Lesser of the Evils in Penny's The Madness of Crowds

I just love Louise Penny. There it is. So, I cannot be objective about her fabulous books in the Armand Gamache series even though I understand that some of her readers found number seventeen, “The Madness of Crowds,” just too dark. Gamache’s latest outing is set once again in the village of Three Pines, an idyllic spot where my college roommate and I have decided we would love to retire to if the winters weren’t quite so long. There is a pub and a bookstore. Does one need anything else?

Penny was in Covid lockdown with her brother and theorizing about what the world would look like after the virus begins to dissipate, when we can hug, kiss, and gather again. For Armand and his wife, the librarian Reine-Marie, it was looking fabulous. Both of their children, their spouses, and kids were back in town for the holidays. In episode sixteen Armand and his long-estranged son Daniel found a path back to each other while Armand’s daughter Annie, married to his second in command Jean Guy Beauvoir, had given birth to a daughter whose Down syndrome did little to tarnish their unmitigated joy.

When Armand is asked to provide security for a lecture at the local university he wonders why, he is after all the head of the homicide department for the Surete du Quebec but decides it will be a quick in and out and won’t upset the family’s holiday plans too much. Until, that is, he reads about the speaker, Dr. Abigail Robinson, and the controversial plan she intends to present to the Canadian government based upon her statistical analysis of the numbers of elderly deaths put down to Covid. If you remember the Texas politician who proclaimed that older folks should willingly die so that the economy would not have to be shut down, then you know where Ms. Penny is going here. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dan-patrick-sacrifice-grandparents_n_5e796dd8c5b6f5b7c549df25

Naturally, the crowded hall is standing room only, pro and con verbally assaulting each other, until the gunshots shatter the podium and Armand finds himself shielding a woman whose beliefs are anathema to him. In the ensuing chaos the shooter escapes and soon the full force of the Surete descends on Three Pines just as the villagers are preparing to host a Sudanese refugee and potential Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Haniya Daoud. And before the new year a second attempt at murder in the idyllic village will succeed.

Louise Penny loves the denizens of Three Pines, but she never portrays them as saints. She knows their dark places and understands how close to the edge of good and evil most human beings teeter. She has taken Jean Guy to the depths of drug and alcohol use and brought him back to life with love. She has allowed Gamache’s honor and bravery and goodness to be questioned and derided and brought him back with love.

In this book Penny almost overwhelms readers with the horrors of war, government sponsored torture, eugenics, and the survival of the fittest. Through Jean Guy and Gamache she lays bare the depths of paternal love and she wonders how much good a person must do in their life to amend a past wrong. But most timely is her deep dive into the issue of free speech and the potential censoring and censuring of those who philosophies might be too repugnant to propagate. Though many of her readers feel that this novel is too political I’ve always thought that Penny steers remarkably clear of moral absolutes. She simply asks the questions. We are the ones left to find the answers.