The Madness of Crowds: A Novel (Chief Inspector Gamache Novel, 17)
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.
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Community Reviews
We are met with a few new cast of characters and the return of some of our beloved ones. This time we meet Professor Abigail Robinson, a University lecturer in statistics who became a cult figure whether she likes to see herself as that or not. Robinson’s views are controversial. Her facts are inevitably correct; her conclusions, however, based on probability theory, suggest the advantages of mass euthanasia – mercy killing, as she calls it – of the ill, the handicapped, and the aged.
“Fortunately,” she says, “numbers don’t have feelings.”
“No,” Gamache responds, “but the mathematician, the statistician, does…. as do homicide investigators…. The same set of facts can lead us to different conclusions. Our interpretation of facts can depend on our experiences ... on what we want the facts to say.”
Several attempts have been made on her life. So far, she survives each and every single one of them. But will her luck run out?
When it does, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache will be there ready to solve the case. But with his views totally against all that Professor Robinson is lecturing, will he want to solve the case?
My emotions were truly up and down. It was a gripping read and a hard one because like, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, I too disagree vehemently with what Professor Robinson proposes. I don’t believe in a mercy killing. Had a hold on me until the very last pages.
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