A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny, Book Review

Wow, what a great read. There are lots of well-written crime novels on the market but this one grabbed me personally. Perhaps because it’s set in a police academy and I’ve been a teacher and lecturer myself, perhaps because it’s set in Quebec and I was born in Canada, perhaps just because it’s a great plot with interesting characters. The second part to the setting is an unmapped village in the Eastern Townships with a small church and a stained-glass window concealing a mystery.

The main protagonist, Inspector Gamache is a good man. It’s not really fashionable in these image driven days to be good anymore - we need to be successful, look good in selfies, be interesting and appear to take an interest in social justice, as long as there is no personal cost to us. However, no one wants to be thought of as good or decent anymore. Police inspectors are supposed to be drunks or have any amount of neuroses or skeletons in the closet and be as demon driven as the criminals they are hunting. Not Inspector Gamache, who has suffered more than most for seeing that justice is done, that the rule of law survives and that common decency remains at the heart of the community, as I said, he is a good man. Intelligent, perceptive, brave and a great strategist, but all in the service of something greater than himself.

When corruption and viciousness take over the Surete, the Quebec provincial police force, Gamache goes in search of the root cause, the driving force behind this evil cloud that is enveloping an institution created to protect and serve its community, not brutalise it. Like a consummate chess player, he plans and plots every move in a deadly game which will endanger not only his students but those he loves. Along the way, he picks up abandoned strays and helps them to find inner strength and a purpose – at great cost to himself. That is why for me A Great Reckoning is so life affirming and gives me hope. If a book with a good man can make it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, then not all is lost for our precarious world.   

Louise Penny is the recipient of virtually every existing award for crime fiction. She was also granted the Order of Canada in 2014. 

First published in Great Britain by Sphere in 2016.