The Nature of the Beast, Louise Penny, author, Robert Bathurst, narrator
Three Pines is the name of the quiet village that former Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his wife Reine-Marie have settled down in, since his retirement. She had once had a career at the National Library. The small community is peopled with a menagerie of odd, but interesting, likeable creatures, appreciated for their strangeness. One character is an addle-brained, rude, crude talking woman who likes her drink. She has a pet duck named Rosa. Another is an artist described as having bits of food in her hair, while still another has purple hair combed in spikes. She is attempting to put on a play written by a serial killer! Then there is the former psychologist and bookstore owner, the grocer, the draft dodger and songwriter-singer and father of Laurent, the boy who likes to tell tall tales, and, of course, there is Inspector Armand Gamache and his wife, plus several others. Gamache was a former homicide detective with the Sûreté, (the police department). Some characters are not residents of the town but are drawn to it when Laurent discovers what he calls a huge gun with a monster writhing upon it. Two characters are from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the CSIS, one is a scientist who designed the supergun discovered in the forest, one is an unscrupulous arms dealer, one is a professor and scientist with a specialty in guns, one is a madman housed in the SHU, the special facility that handles high security prisoners. The number of characters can be very confusing for someone who has not read the previous 10 novels written about Inspector Gamache.
In this, the eleventh novel, the new narrator does an excellent job creating the tension of the murder investigation and also of expressing the humorous aspects of the broad assortment of characters as they interact. I have to admit that I was so engaged with the story that I listened from beginning to end in one day. I couldn’t wait to discover how the mystery would resolve itself. All of the loose ends were eventually tied up, and I think the author may have set it up for the next one in the series, or perhaps for one later on down the road, since some of the characters seemed to have left a kind of fingerprint for the next one, indicating that they might someday return to resolve other issues. There will always be those demented creatures desiring to invent destructive weapons, once the door opens on the possibility; there will always be those who try to prevent them and protect society. Also, it was mentioned that Inspector Gamache has been offered the job as Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec. One is left conjecturing about whether or not he would take the job offer or would both he and his wife go into more professorial pursuits, like Professor Rosenblatt, the authority on guns.
Briefly, the story revolves around a young boy who has a reputation for telling lies. He is found murdered only a short time after he came running into the town’s bistro and excitedly announced that he had discovered a huge weapon in the woods, a weapon with a seven-headed monster writhing upon it. Needless to say, his story was not believed until his body was found and the weapon was discovered. Former Chief Inspector Gamache had been close to the child and although retired, he was drawn into the investigation, aiding the new Chief Inspector, Isabelle Lacoste. The twists and turns take the reader into the world of Gerald Bull, Saddam Hussein, the Viet Nam War, and John Fleming, a mad serial killer resembling the likes of Hannibal Lechter.
The story is cleverly rolled out with a wide assortment of subplots which misdirect and confuse, so the reader is always wondering what will happen next The mystery concerns Project Babylon, a secret program to develop a supergun, a weapon of mass destruction. While I found the idea a bit implausible, at the end of the audio, I learned that the story is actually based on the real Gerald Bull, a Canadian Artillery Expert commissioned by Saddam Hussein to build real superguns which were called Baby Babylon and Big Babylon. Fortunately, the weapon failed to work, but there still may be madmen out there trying to recreate a working model. The story was exciting as the search for the murderer progressed and the history of the weapon and its designer became the focus of the investigation. Fingers were pointed in many different directions which only enhanced the mystery. Sometimes it even felt that something supernatural might even be lurking in the background.
I fell in love with Inspector Gamache. I connected completely with his mostly quiet and thoughtful approach to crime solving and his willingness to put his life on the line to do what was right, willing to make the hard choices necessary to protect the most people. He seemed to exhibit that thoughtfulness in his relationship with his wife and in his approach to his retirement, as well. Reine-Marie was the ideal wife, completely supportive; they seemed fulfilled and content, simpatico, which made me admire them both. No one minor character in the novel seemed to take precedence over another. It was mostly about the Inspector and his approach to solving the crime and the mystery of the murder and the supergun.
I wondered if the opening scene with someone running from pursuers in the woods was meant to be a part of the boy’s imagination, his version of how he discovered the weapon, or was it simply a merging of the first and last scenes of the book, the discovery of the weapon and the end of it. It was definitely a device used to indicate some clues and to misdirect the reader since the person running seemed older than a boy with a stick that morphed into a rifle.