The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny
Penny’s 19th Gamache novel starts slowly with
strange phone calls and proceeds into a complex dissection of fateful moral
choices. Do you save your family and run or make an effort to save the planet? What we are saving the planet from is a large-scale
terrorist conspiracy that reaches into the heart of a corrupt government. More
specifically the issue in The Grey Wolf involves a plot to insert a
deadly poison into the water supply which will kill thousands and create a
panic in the population. The panic will drive citizens to support a new strong
leader who will then use his power to subjugate the populace and enrich himself
and his cronies. Does this sound just a bit familiar to you?
The book starts in Three Pines and does journey back on
occasion, but by and large, we see little of the fascinating group of residents
that add just the right warmth and humor to Penny’s writing. The wolves dominate here. Several of Gamache’s old cases
keep popping back up and I can see her point to deepen the psyche of her main
character, but it may disconcert new readers. The re-appearance of the grisly slaughter
and the nasty frozen monastery on the lake may not be as significant for them
as for me. Forgive me if I find that Penny seems to be targeting re-current
readers at the expense of new ones. Perhaps she feels that, given the size of
her following, there is no need to curry favor with newcomers to her work.
Through it all Armand Gamache does survive, though once
again battered and torn. For the moment the Grey and Black wolves are kept at
bay. Some friends turn out to be enemies and some foes to be friends. The foes want to stop Gamache because he cannot
be corrupted. His friends know that he will choose the survival of the society
at large even though his own family may be sacrificed. John Stuart Mill’s
philosophy of Utilitarianism comes to mind. The moral direction should be to
maximize utility and produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of
citizens with the least pain.
It's still a fine hook and I will be on the list to get the next adventure that her ending of this one is pointing to. Gosh, shouldn't be ending a sentence with a preposition!
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