The unraveling of this connection is at the heart of the book, and will take the reader on a journey into Gamache’s past. And there seems to be a mysterious connection between Amelia and Gamache. She is highly intelligent, but everyone except Gamache thinks she’s unsuited for police work. Amelia is a deeply scarred young woman, with many tattoos and body piercings, who has lived a life of prostitution and drug abuse. He also decides to admit a young cadet named Amelia Choquet, after Leduc had rejected her.

To everyone’s great surprise, he keeps the former head of the academy, Serge Leduc, on when he could have fired him, as well as hiring Michel Brébeuf, his former best friend who has betrayed him. It has been turning out brutal young officers for the past few years, and Gamache comes to teach compassion and kindness to the cadets. In A Great Reckoning, Gamache, after having rooted out corruption in the Sûreté du Québec, decides to come out of retirement to lead the Sûreté Academy, which is now the last part of the Sûreté that is still corrupt. Some of the recipes are available at the publisher’s website, The Nature of the Feast. The books also feature mouthwatering meals from the bistro. If you haven’t read the series before, you will quickly fall in love with Three Pines and its inhabitants, including the artist Clara, the bookstore owner Myrna, Olivier and Gabri, the owners of the bistro, and even the cantankerous old poet Ruth, who lives with a pet duck named Rosa. As longtime readers of the series know, Three Pines doesn’t appear on any maps, and cell phones, GPS, and the internet don’t work there. In this, the twelfth book in the series, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the former head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec, has recently retired, with his wife Reine-Marie, a librarian, to the tiny village of Three Pines. I hesitated about whether to review A Great Reckoning for Lost in the Stacks, since Louise Penny’s series is very popular, but I find there are still a lot of people who haven’t heard of it.

A great reckoning by louise penny