The Madness of Crowds

Summary: After Covid, a researcher proposes mandated euthanasia and eugenics as an economic response, and Gamache is asked to protect her and then solve a murder that may be related.

I do not know how authors will deal with the reality of Covid over the coming years. Of course, such a globally important event will find its way into many books of fiction and non-fiction, but what about as Covid is still very active? In the 17th book of this series, Louise Penny, a series that comes out annually in early fall, had to have written The Madness of Crowds as Covid was raging. But the Madness of Crowds is a consciously post-Covid book. The book opens with the town of Three Pines holding a memorial and the first real gathering after vaccines became widespread. And if only that were how Covid really had ended, cleanly without additional varients and outbreaks and widespread vaccine rejections. However, the Madness of Crowds is fiction, and in this fictional world that is not real in many different ways, Covid had a clean ending, albeit one that was still filled with trauma, grief, and loss.

Covid matters in another plot point. At the start of the book, Gamache is asked to provide security for a lecture at a small college near Three Pines. The Canadian government commissioned Abigail Robinson, a statistician, to prepare a report about shoring up the national health system in response to the widespread cost and devastation as a result of Covid. Dr. Robinson's report is rejected before it was released, and a cult following develops around Dr. Robinson as she independently presents her findings. Violence has erupted at several earlier lectures as both supporters and protesters grapple with her call to mandate euthanasia for the elderly and disabled as a means to protect the economy and the national health system from economic ruin.

Because this is an Inspector Gamache novel, it is clear that there will be a murder at some point that Gamache and his team will have to solve. That murder will require digging into the background of those involved, and many people will have a motive and previously unseen connections. I am not sure when it happened, but as I was reading this 17th novel in a series that I deeply love, I realized that the genre of the series shifted from mystery to thriller without me noticing. The Madness of Crowds and many of the previous books are not mysteries because the reader is trying to figure out who the killer was. Instead, the Madness of Crowds is a thriller that is trying to communicate tension and ideas.

Chief Inspector Gamache and his second in command (and son-in-law) Jean-Guy Beauvoir have a personal stake in the plan; their youngest child/grandchild, born in a previous book, has Down's Syndrome. Beauvoir has to process what it means to be the father of a child who is unlikely to be fully independent. He deeply loves the child, but he also grieves. Gamache has to navigate the line of protecting people with unpopular and dangerous ideas and pushing back against that danger.

The Madness of Crowds also explores mass movements and complicity with horrible actions. Like many of Penny's books, this is a book of ideas as much as a fictional story. It avoids being propaganda or pedantic by keeping the story moving and centered on the crimes. Like most of the Gamache books, it is Gamache's love for those around him that drives his passion and desire to see justice and safety win out. Love, even for the perpetrators, allows for insight, but at a cost.

As I keep saying for the whole Inspector Gamache series, these books keep being engaging, and the thread has not yet worn out. Admittedly, their characters do not always age as one might expect, and the mythology of the lost town of Three Pines still doesn't completely make sense, but some of that is just part of the charm of the fictional story. And now I have another year to wait for the next novel.