Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Penny, who’s never met a story idea big enough to daunt her, unspools the endless puzzles surrounding a corpse whose identity isn’t known but whose status as a murder victim is clear. “There’s a body in Lost Nation,” a dead-of-night telephone call informs Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the homicide division at the Sûreté du Québec. Why is the informant calling Gamache’s personal line, and how did they get his number? For that matter, who placed the call? It certainly wasn’t Clara Morrow, the Gamaches’ neighbor and friend, whose phone seems to have been used by someone who visited her home. And where is Lost Nation? This last question, at least, yields an answer: It’s an Indigenous burial ground that’s been overgrown with trees and, more recently, a corpse too badly decomposed to be readily identified. An autopsy reveals that the victim was beaten to death. In the absence of further clues to his identity, Gamache and his colleagues focus on May 29, 1914, the date engraved on the otherwise unreadable headstone over the gravesite where the body was found. The trail to the killer leads back to a 1967 interview genealogist Jeannette Bouchard conducted with local historian Flossy Fuller the day before they were both killed in a car crash, and still further back to the real-life sinking of theEmpress of Ireland, an ocean liner as unfamiliar to Penny’s characters as it will be to most of her readers. Even after Gamache has arrested the responsible parties, the biggest riddle remains: the secret of the balefully ugly plant known as Miss Wolcott’s Ghost. A superpowered mystery shrouded in mysticism and history whose power endures past its closing revelations. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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Penny’s exceptional latest case for Armand Gamache (after The Black Wolf) sees the Québécois homicide inspector unravel a historical tragedy while investigating a contemporary murder. Gamache is disturbed by an anonymous call to his home phone from a familiar-sounding male voice, who informs him that “there’s a body in Lost Nation.” The questions multiply after Gamache learns the call came from a number belonging to artist Clara Morrow, one of his friends and neighbors in the small community of Three Pines, who insists she has no idea who called him. Gamache and his team learn that the Lost Nation is an abandoned cemetery, and arrive there to find a victim who’s been bludgeoned to death and left near a plant long believed to be extinct. The twisting trail of clues includes a forgotten shipwreck, a pioneering female botanist, and a lucrative firm specializing in genealogical research. While readers will be entranced by the wide circle of suspects, Penny gives this entry its power through her empathic exploration of her characters’ humanity, with many key plot points hinging on thorny questions of individual morality. The author’s combination of tight plotting and psychological depth continues to place her in a class of her own. (Oct.)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

It is a muddy spring in Three Pines. Armand Gamache is awakened by a 3:17 a.m. ghostly anonymous call on his personal line. “There’s a body in Lost Nation.” A man’s voice. Vaguely familiar. He phones Sûreté HQ to have the number traced, and it seems that the point of origin was the line of one C. Morrow. Clara? Clara Morrow, their friend and neighbor? Of course not. The townsfolk are assembled and, to a one, can’t or won’t say what or where Lost Nation is or was. Gamache perseveres and finally learns that it’s a ghost town set in a clearing in a dense old-growth forest, and up on a slope is an odd little cemetery. The body is there, several months decomposed and wearing an 80-year-old tweed suit from London. Thus opens the twenty-first Chief Inspector Gamache mystery, an intriguing puzzle offered in elegant golden-age detective-fiction prose. Gamache and his team grapple with ghosts of their own as Penney characteristically delivers a grim and determined investigation with charm—“not much seemed to happen in Three Pines. Though when it did, it was often quite shocking and took some telling.” As always, this Gamache tale is fueled by the offerings of the Bistro. Readers should savor every bite and every word. HIGH DEMAND