A great reckoning /

A HUGE WEIGHT of grief bears down like a marble tombstone On A GREAT RECKONING (Minotaur, $28.99), Louise Penny's disquieting mystery featuring Armand Gamache, the retired homicide chief of the Sûreté du Québec. Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, are wintering among their eccentric neighbors in the remote village of Three Pines when the first snowfall sends everyone scrambling for the warmth of the fireplace at the local bistro. As the village turns into a scene in a snow globe, the friends take to sorting through the desiccated newspapers, magazines and catalogs stuffed behind the bistro walls as insulation a century earlier ("as though words could keep winter at bay") and salvaged during a renovation. This powerful image opens into a narrative about the lost words and silenced voices of the village sons who marched off with handmade orienteering maps to guide their way back home, but never returned from the battlefields of Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele. Penny weaves their forgotten histories into her artful tale of a charismatic but despised instructor at the police academy who is found murdered in his quarters, perhaps at the hands of one of the cadets favored by Gamache, who, having cleansed the Sûreté of internal corruption, is now charged with sanitizing the academy Despite the theme of defiled innocence that makes this such a mournful story, the immense charm of the Gamache series survives in the magical setting and feisty residents of Three Pines, like the cranky old poet Ruth Zardo ("Bile. She's pure bile") and Clara Morrow, the dotty artist ("Have you ever seen a self-portrait where the person didn't look just a little insane?"). Neighbors open their homes to strangers, a litter of puppies is distributed throughout the village, and feasts great and small are cooked and shared. Like most of the yarns we've heard about Three Pines, this one honors the town elders and respects the rituals of their quiet existence. But in a broader sense, the novel reaches beyond the living to become the saddest kind of ghost story, a lament for all "the phantom life that might have been." MILLY JACKSON, THE central character in Alex Marwood's cruel and cunning mystery THE DARKEST SECRET (Penguin, paper, $16), is in her glory when she's among friends at a bar playing "Spot the Personality Disorder." In fact, she's so good at this game that she's the only one in her trust-fund tribe who's capable of identifying the true psychopaths among them. (Hint: When serious trouble goes down, "they'll be the only people still smiling.") Milly wasn't always such a brittle cynic; she once enjoyed her status as an older, possibly even beloved daughter of Sean Jackson, a wealthy real estate developer and a textbook example of galloping narcissism. But that was before Milly's 3-year-old half sister, Coco, disappeared from the family's weekend home, causing her father's extended harem of current and former wives and their multiple offspring to come tumbling down in a wretched heap. Years on, when Sean himself dies, Milly joins Coco's surviving twin and a crowd of relatives and hangers-on for a macabre funeral at the monstrous pile Sean chose to call Blackheath House. It's the perfect occasion for Marwood to use as the plot-twisting, mind-altering and monstrously funny final chapter in the life of a man who clearly didn't know as much about women as he thought he did. NOBODY WRITES LIKE Ken Bruen, with his ear for lilting Irish prose and his taste for the kind of gallows humor heard only at the foot of the gallows, THE EMERALD LIE (Mysterious Press, $25) is pure Bruen, with its verbal tics, weird typography and unorthodox wordplay Not to mention the odd bits of logic ("Never judge a dog's pedigree by the kind of books he does not chew") and choice quotations from the literary likes of Tennessee Williams ("If I got rid of my demons, I'd lose my angels"). Although Jack Taylor, Bruen's frequently drunk, violent and maudlin detective hero, is still the main draw, he's rivaled by a serial killer who works himself into a murderous rage over improper grammatical usage. ANNE PERRY'S FANS have been following the adventures of her Victorian police detective, Thomas Pitt, and his socially connected wife, Charlotte, right up to the dawn of the new century. But the year is only 1869 in REVENGE IN A COLD RIVER (Ballantine, $28), Perry's latest novel in a grittier series featuring Cmdr. William Monk of the Thames River Police, a troubled man with a past so murky he can't even remember it. Like the great Dickens novel "Our Mutual Friend," the Monk series has a deep, almost primal bond with London's great river, which disgorges all sorts of objects, including human bodies, with each tide. The fresh corpse lying at Monk's feet at the beginning of this uncommonly atmospheric mystery was a master forger, and behind the murder of this "nasty piece of work" lies a clue to the puzzle of Monk's troublesome memory gaps. The storytelling is dazzling, as it always is in a Perry novel; but because the amnesiac hero stands accused of a string of murders he may very well have committed, back in a time he can't recall, the resolution is less an intellectual exercise than a matter of life and death.

*Starred Review* Chief Inspector Gamache has a new gig: he's been appointed head of the Sûreté Academy du Québec and is tasked with cleaning house. The police school has become a seedbed for corruption, devoted to turning out bent cops. The inspector, of course, has a multilayered plan for ridding the school of its multiple malignancies, but before he can begin surgery, the chief offender is murdered, and Gamache himself becomes the leading suspect. Naturally, Penny finds a way for her plot to curlicue back to Three Pines, the remote village where Gamache now lives and whose idiosyncratic denizens provide much of the series' appeal. This time the hook is a map found in the walls of the local bistro not just any map but a cartographic curiosity that may be the only map ever made of Three Pines. So how does a copy of that map find its way to the bedside table of the murder victim? And does its presence further implicate Gamache?Once again Penny displays her remarkable ability to serve equally well both series devotees and new readers (if there are any of those still to be found). Gamache fans will be thrilled by the way this installment unlocks some of the series' enduring questions: Why is Three Pines off the grid? Why do we know so little about Gamache's past? At the same time, the main plot offers a compelling mystery and a rich human drama in which no character is either entirely good or evil, and each is capable of inspiring empathy. Evil, as Gamache notes, quoting Auden, is unspectacular and always human. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A first printing of 500,000 copies will ensure that at least the first wave of Penny readers get their hands on her latest as quickly as possible.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2016 Booklist

The lyrical 12th entry (after 2015's The Nature of the Beast) in bestseller Penny's remarkable series, which has won multiple Agatha awards, finds former Chief Insp. Armand Gamache coming out of retirement to clean up the corrupt Süreté Academy du Québec. When an old map is found hidden in the wall of a bistro in Three Pines, the remote village in which Gamache and his wife live, the locals treat it as only an interesting artifact. But Gamache uses the mystery of the map's origin to engage the interest of four cadets at the academy who are in particular danger of going astray. When someone fatally shoots Serge Leduc, a sadistic, manipulative professor, a copy of the map is found in Leduc's bedside table, and suspicion falls on the four cadets and Gamache himself. As the story unfolds, a web of connections, past and present, comes to light. This complex novel deals with universal themes of compassion, weakness in the face of temptation, forgiveness, and the danger of falling into despair and cynicism over apparently insurmountable evils. Author tour. Agent: Teresa Chris, Teresa Chris Literary Agency. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Armand Gamache chooses to come out of retirement to take over as commander of the Sûreté academy, the corrupt institution training officers to protect Quebec. In this entry (after The Nature of the Beast), Penny combines a map connected to a mystery in Three Pines with murder at the academy to pen a complex psychological mystery, making for a riveting listen. The entire Three Pines cast of characters are once again present as social, historical, and philosophical issues are examined and resolved. Series devotees will be delighted to visit with Ruth, Clara, Myrna, and the rest of the gang, and those new to the series will find them fresh and fascinating. New characters are introduced, and one character in particular is highlighted; Amelia Choquet, a tattooed and studded enigma, is particularly well-drawn. This volume is the second splendidly interpreted by Robert Bathurst after the death of longtime series narrator Ralph Cosham. Bathurst beautifully expresses the mood and tenor of Penny's characters, themes, and plots. VERDICT A marvelous entry in an amazing series. ["This riveting read, with characters of incredible depth who only add to the strength of the plot, will keep readers guessing until the last page": LJ 7/16 starred review of the Minotaur: St. Martin's hc.]-Sandra C. -Clariday, Cleveland, TN © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.