It’s a Mystery: “God may not play dice, but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again”
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All the Devils Are Here
By Louise Penny
Minotaur, 2020
The setting of Louise Penny’s sixteenth Armand Gamache novel (after 2019’s A Better Man) moves from his home in Three Pines in Quebec to Paris. There Gamache, now the head of the homicide division for the Sûreté du Québec, and his wife Reine-Marie, await the birth of daughter Annie’s second child. She and her husband, Jean-Guy Bauvoir, Gamache’s esteemed number two for many years, relocated to France, where they had both been offered jobs.
On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather for a reunion dinner with the family and Gamache’s billionaire godfather, Stephen Horowitz, at their favorite bistro, Juveniles. The gathering includes Gamache’s son, Daniel, also lured to Paris by a job. Walking home together after the meal, they watch in horror as Horowitz is knocked down by a speeding van and critically injured. Gamache believes the hit-and-run was intentional and sets out to determine who wanted his elderly godfather, the man who helped raise him after he was orphaned, dead.
Might Horowitz, Gamache wonders, knowing that the old man has devoted his life to exposing corporate wrongdoers, have been playing a long game aimed at revealing some shocking malfeasance at GHS Electronics, the company where Beauvoir now works?
The business magnate intimidated all around him…. It wasn’t simply the force of his personality and the immense wealth he was busy acquiring and wielding, but his willingness to use both power and money to destroy those he felt were crooks.
Sometimes it took him years, but eventually, he brought them down. Power. And patience. Stephen Horowitz had command of both. He was genuinely kind and openly ruthless. And when he turned those intense blue eyes on a quarry, they quaked…. Stephen was now ninety-three and, while growing frailer, was still formidable. Still going in to work every day, and terrorizing those who needed the fear of, if not God, then this godfather put into them.
Now, Horowitz lies critically wounded. Armand must convince Claude Dussault, an old friend as well as the Prefect of Police in Paris, that the “accident” should be treated as attempted murder. It’s an impression that is reinforced the next morning when he and Reine-Marie go to Stephen’s apartment and find the place a total wreck. In the midst of the desecration is a corpse who has been shot twice.
The tension escalates as Gamache proceeds to investigate both crimes in a territory where he has no real authority. That has never stopped him. As always, Penny excels at creating a meticulously constructed mystery. In the process, she reveals unvarnished truths about the hidden workings of the world—as well as a nuanced portrait of the Gamache clan—warts and all.
Plus, her evocation of the City of Light is as masterful as the increased role she ever so subtly allots to Reine-Marie. The librarian’s research skills are crucial to untying the intricate knot at the mystery’s core. As ever, Penny’s deft touch with plotting only enhances her in-depth character studies.
Louise Penny is very special and All the Devils Are Here is an exceptional addition to the Gamache series.
—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.