No one is infallible. Armand Gamache knows very well what abysses the human soul hides, because during his service with the Sureté du Québec, he has peered countless times behind the facade of seemingly blameless lives. But he also learned that even decades of experience, a cool head and trained instincts may not guarantee success in the pursuit of a criminal. Sometimes it is enough to make a fatal mistake in a second. This story brings the chief inspector to the Quebec metropolis, behind whose fairy-tale backdrops slumber centuries of animosity between Anglophone and Francophone Canadians. The discovery of a dead man in the cellar of the venerable Literary and Historical Society may become the kindling of long-suppressed passions, the prelude to an explosion whose consequences would be unfathomable. And there is one more case that keeps Gamache awake. The murder of a hermit in Three Pines, for which he convicted the local owner of the bistro Olivier...