Excerpt from A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But something had niggled at him and he kept returning to that one file. Reading and rereading it. Trying to work out why this one dossier, this one young woman out of all of them, was troubling him.

Gamache had brought the file with him, and now he opened it. Again. Her face stared at him. Arrogant, challenging. Pale. Her hair jet black, shaved in places, spiked in others. There were unmistakable piercings through her nose and brows and cheek.

She claimed to read ancient Greek and Latin, and yet she'd barely scraped by in high school and had spent the past few years doing, from what he could tell, nothing.

She'd earned the red dot.

So why did he keep going back to it? To her? It wasn't her appearance. He knew enough to look beyond that.

Was it her name? Amelia?

Yes, he thought, that might be it. She shared the name with Gamache's mother, who'd been named for the aviator who'd lost her way and disappeared. Amelia.

And yet, when he held the file he didn't feel any warmth. In fact, he felt vaguely revolted.

Finally Gamache took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes before taking Henri outside for a last walk of the night, in the first snow of the season.

Then it was upstairs to bed for both of them.


The next morning Reine- Marie invited her husband to breakfast at the bistro. Henri came along and lay quietly under their table as they sipped bowls of café au lait and waited for their maple- cured bacon with scrambled eggs and Brie.

The fireplaces on either end of the long beamed room were lit and cheerful, conversation mingled with the scent of wood smoke, and there was the familiar thudding of patrons knocking snow from their boots as they entered.

The flurries had stopped in the night, leaving just a thin layer barely covering the dead autumn leaves. It seemed a netherworld. Neither fall nor winter. The hills that surrounded the village and seemed to guard it from an often hostile world themselves looked hostile. Or, if not actually hostile, at least inhospitable. It was a forest of skeletons. Their branches, gray and bare, were raised as though begging for a mercy they knew would not be granted.

But on the village green itself stood the three tall pines from which the village took its name. Vibrant, straight and strong. Evergreen. Immortal. Pointing to the sky. Daring it to do its worst. Which it planned to do. The worst was coming. But so was the best. The snow angels were coming.

"Voilà," said Olivier, placing a basket of warm almandine croissants on their table. "While you wait for breakfast."

A price tag hung from the basket. And from the chandelier above their heads. And the wing chairs they sat on. Everything in Olivier's bistro was for sale. Including, he'd intimated more than once, his partner, Gabri. "A bag of candy and he's yours," Olivier was heard to offer patrons when Gabri turned up in his frilly apron.

"That is how he got me," Gabri would admit, smoothing the apron he only wore, they all knew, to piss off Olivier. "A bag of allsorts."

When they were alone, Armand slid a file across the table to his wife.

"Could you read this, please?"

"Of course," she said as she put on her glasses. "Is there a problem?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Then why . . . ?" She gestured toward the folder.

He'd often discussed cases with her, before his early retirement from the Sûreté. He was not yet sixty and this was more of a retreat, really. To this village, to recover from what lay beyond the ridge of mountains.

He watched her over the rim of his strong, fragrant coffee, holding the warm bowl between his hands. They no longer trembled, Reine-Marie noted. Or at least not often. She always looked, in case.

And the deep scar near his temple wasn't quite so deep. Or perhaps familiarity and relief had filled it in.

Excerpted from A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny. Copyright © 2016 by Louise Penny. Excerpted by permission of Minotaur Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.