The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny ***

The Madness of Crowds is Louise Penny’s Covid-19 novel (#17 in the Inspector Gamache series). Starting with the people allowed to die from Covid-19 in nursing homes, the novel explores justifications for torture and murder from science to euthanasia to self-defense. Warning: some of the torture scenes are vivid. This is not what I was looking for.

There is a murder in Three Pines that Chief Inspector Gamache, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Isabelle Lacoste solve. The antecedents include the murder of a Down Syndrome child, a couple of suicides, the murder of child soldiers, death by neglect of Covid-19 victims, and torture of human scientific subjects. This is a story with a high body count.

Fans of Louise Penny will be happy to know that everyone in Three Pines survived the Covid-19 pandemic and make appearances in this book.

If you are tired of forensic scientists solving crimes in ever more technical ways, this novel is perfect. There is very little evidence. The lack of evidence is replaced by extensive philosophical discussions about human nature and motivations for murder. My one complaint is that these discussions ping-pong between the handful of suspects so often that by the end, I didn’t care who the murderer was. I’d have been happy if an explosion had done away with them all -- not one of them was worthy of redemption.

I enjoyed the early Gamache novels, but I do not recommend this one.

Great quotes:

Great sentences leading to wisdom: “‘I’m sorry.’ ‘I was wrong.’ ‘I don’t know.’” As he listed them, Chief Inspector Gamache raised a finger, until his palm was open. “‘I need help.’”

100^th monkey: “No, nothing special at all about her,” said Gilbert. “Interesting, isn’t it? Why it should suddenly take off like that? What difference that one monkey, the hundredth, made. What’s even more interesting is that they then discovered monkeys on other islands doing the same thing. None of them had washed their sweet potatoes before, but now they all were.”

Detective process: “I can’t see how it can relate to the murder of Deborah Schneider on New Year’s Eve,” said the coroner, pulling her coat off the back of the chair. “Neither can I,” admitted Gamache. “We’re just assembling the pieces. Most are not helpful.”

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