I got this hardcover at Barnes and Noble. (There's a lovely cityscape of Paris on the endpapers!) This follows the events of A Better Man, continuing the adventures of Armand Gamache - with a significant change of scene: Gamache and his wife are visiting Paris, where their children and grandchildren now live. And of course a crime rears its head...

The Paris setting is refreshing, and at first the scene is of domestic bliss - Jean-Guy and Annie seem to be getting along with Daniel and Roslyn, and the latter's children seem pleased with their new cousin Honore and the soon-to-be-born baby. But we get a reminder that there have been strained relations between Daniel and his father Armand, something Armand can't account for; this has been hinted at in previous books, and here it comes to a head. [Side note: once we find out what caused the breach, I admit to being a bit underwhelmed; not that it couldn't have affected a sensitive child that way, but it seems so bizarre that neither party could guess/understand/explain for so long.]

Anyway: We get more back story about Armand himself, his godfather Stephen (now a nonagenarian billionaire who still has his fingers in a few high-finance pies), and other members of the family - and then Stephen is run down in the street right in front of the Gamaches, and is taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries.

Armand is sure this was no accident, but can't get the police to agree until he finds another body inside Stephen's ransacked apartment - and suddenly everyone's caught up in what seems to be a vast and high-level conspiracy that may include members of the police department, high-placed people from Jean-Guy's new employers, and perhaps Stephen himself.

While I enjoyed the setting (there's a lovely bit in the Rodin gardens, featuring the Burghers of Calais; this was a key moment in young Armand's life, and as I was able to visit the spot myself some decades ago I appreciated my own memories), the plot got a little out of hand. Oh, true, Armand has a long history of anticipating trouble, thinking on his feet, and coming up with clever plans and backups on the fly, but here the foes are so powerful and deadly that I couldn't quite believe the scenes where people were allowed to stand around and discuss things. True-life bad-guys of that ilk would, I suspect, just shoot the victims and get them out of the way... But allowing for dramatic license, the story had its points, and included some very satisfactory twists - not least the ones that I'd guessed ahead of time. [Penny does often telegraph key clues, though precisely what they mean may not come out until much later. This has the Alfred Hitchcock effect of making the reader perk up whenever the item/person/incident is mentioned, waiting to see if the characters will get it yet {wry grin}.]

I appreciated the way Armand and his son managed to work out their differences, though it took some extreme situations to get them there. As ever, Armand and Jean-Guy are a perfect team (something that has not helped with Daniel's situation, though he comes to realize that Jean-Guy's relationship with his father does not threaten his own), and while Jean-Guy has the imminent birth of his next child to worry about, he does manage to do some very creditable sleuthing - and some tiger-like defense of his family.

And Reine-Marie gets a chance to shine, taking her archivist skills to the great Paris archives where she teams up with Allida Lenoir (chief archivist) and her wife Judith de la Granger (chief librarian), an information power couple if there ever was one. Watching the three of them deep-dive into the archives hunting for clues was highly satisfying.

There's also a young security-firm agent whose loyalties seem questionable at first, but whose interest in Gamache has shown him that the mercenary life isn't the only way to be.

Lots of tense moments, some snarky humor, some warm family scenes - and a conclusion that suggests that things back in Three Pines and Quebec will be getting another shakeup soon.

Guidelines for safely visiting and stocking Little Free Libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, from the LFL site here.

I left this book in the Little Free Library; hope someone enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in MA here.]

*** Released for the 2020 D for December challenge. ***