Review: 'The Grey Wolf'
The Grey Wolf
By Louise Penny
Crime fiction
October 2024
Minotaur Books
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache in Louise Penny's Three Pines mysteries has long been more than a homicide investigator. As the series has progressed, Gamache and his creator have been more concerned with the whydunit of a murder, rather than the traditional whodunit.
Much like P.D. James with Adam Dalgleish, Penny puts Gamache into situations that force him and his colleagues and family to grapple with damaged human beings. They have to make judgments, sometimes immediately and under stress, of when to treat someone with grace and when to protect. They are not always right.
That Gamache makes mistakes has been becoming more and more prominent in the series. In the 19th Three Pines novel, The Grey Wolf, trust and being right are at the core of the story.
It goes back to the time Gamache and his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvior, went to a remote lakeside monastery to investigate a murder in that closed community. In The Beautiful Mystery, published in 2012, the monastery's abbot told Gamache a legend, first told to him by an indigenous elder, that is the foundation of this novel.
An elder told a young person that as a child, he felt there were two wolves fighting each other inside him. One was a grey wolf that wanted compassion, wisdom, the courage to forgive. The other was a black wolf that wanted vengeance, cruelty, brutality and no forgiveness. Which wolf won? The elder replies: The one that I feed.
In the novel, the question of who Gamache should trust -- who is a grey wolf and who is a black wolf --is central to stopping what may be a terrorist plot. Gamache, and others in his circle, also must contend with which wolf in their own psyche they are feeding.
Old enemies and new friends both have their honesty and intentions questioned. Gamache realizes that he has to be correct in who he can trust, because the consequences are so immense. He even questions whether there is a terrorist plot that he and his team are trying to uncover.
Penny has written about widespread corruption among public officials, especially police, before. For readers who prefer her insightful, compassionate examinations of what makes a human being whole and capable of good or evil, The Grey Wolf brings the personal to the action thriller plot. Character, and characters, matter.
The conventions of mystery storytelling provide an engaging way to wrestle with questions like who to forgive and when to trust. The Three Pines characters provide both comfort and explorations of how one does the best one can.