Professor Abigail Robinson will be giving a lecture at the nearby university. Armand Gamache has been asked to provide security. Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture. They refuse, citing academic freedom, and accuse Gamache of censorship and intellectual cowardice. Abigail Robinson promises that, if they follow her, "All will be well." A murder is committed and Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and their team will investigate the crime. The post-pandemic plot meandered a bit and felt a little off somehow. I'm not sure it is time for a post-pandemic book as the virus is still lingering on. At least there was a visit to Three Pines to visit the whole gang. That seems to be where Penny should focus her books as Three Pines is what her readers look forward to. The ending of the book seemed to drag on too long. I'm still looking forward to the next book but hope to spend more time in Three Pines.

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This was a very nice read back to Three Pines, but it fell apart right toward the end. The repetition page after page of which of the 3 was the murderer got really tiresome, really tiresome...and didn't even make sense. It should have been cut out and the culprit identified sooner. I reached a point when I didn't even care to know which of the 3 did it simply because of the repetition. Up to that point it was her usual very good book. Enjoyable curled up in a big chair.

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This book was either written, or published waaay too soon. I feel like Penny had an contract with her publisher to write so many books in so much time, and here it is. She apparently started this book in March of 2020-yet it starts off with miracle of miracles, a vaccination for Covid! Everyone has received it, yahoo!! And there are no side effects mentioned, no mask mandates, etc.,and life is again perfect in Three Pines, and the world. It was a little too soon, in my opinion. Maybe I'm just tired of the perfect life of Gamache and his friends and family. I found this to be the weakest of the 17 books. Not only written/published too soon, it is about 100 pages too long. Lots of meandering around figuring out who did what, and when and how. Lots of hot chocolate being doled out to all the cute children, whiskey to the conflicted adults. When your favorite character in a murder mystery is a duck, something is wrong.

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As always, Penny's writing style carries you along. And if you've read all the books in the series, you'll enjoy the company of some old friends. I have read all the books, but certain references to past events eluded me and were a distraction. At 600 pages, this tale was way too long, and the three main investigators seem to rehash the same points over and over and over. I also felt there were way too many connections between characters that stretched my suspension of disbelief. (And since the life span of a duck is about 10 years, how is Rosa still quacking along?)

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I have one major quibble with this book, and one major applause, and they are related.

Penny, in this novel, declares the pandemic "over". Everything is back to normal, nothing to worry about, nobody's dying anymore. That is simply not true. A lot of people believe the vaccines were the whole answer and they were not. People are still dying and Covid keeps mutating so we never know when it might turn into something even more horrific than what we've seen. It makes no sense to pretend it's all over.

Because of the failure of health organizations around the world, and world leaders, we are stuck with Covid. It could have been nipped in the bud and it wasn't. So we are stuck with it. So it is understandable that we will all find ways to live with it. I do not propose that we all hide out in our homes or that we wear masks everywhere, outdoors as well as in. But it's smart to take reasonable precautions. Thus I don't fault Penny for representing her characters as returning to some kind of normal. I just feel it suggests that she does not understand the disease.

What I applaud is that this whole novel takes on an issue that was raised by Covid, bigtime, yet has not really been addressed adequately. That is the casual way many people chose to dismiss the lives of the elderly and the compromised, as if they have no value to anyone. The callous disregard, to me, has been shocking.

Thus arises the character of Abigail Robinson, a professor of statistics. She has examined the effects of Covid and came to the conclusion that the world's economy and future depend on our getting rid of these "frail" persons. Essentially, mandatory euthanasia. And she is getting quite a following.

When Inspector Gamache is called on to provide security for a talk she is giving, he doesn't know much about her, but he soon grasps the horror of it, realizing that, among others, his grandchild with Down Syndrome would be targeted in Robinson's world.

The professor's talk does not go well, as it is interrupted by unexpected events. Not long after, there is a death. And here is when Gamache and team get to move in for real, to find the killer.

The possibilities turn out to be many, and it seems that the investigators go back and forth and up and down trying each one out. For me it actually got tiresome. I was grateful that there was less of the "I'm FINE" activity (Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical), but there was a lot of quoting of the same lines from poems, and of the phrase "All will be well". I reached a saturation point. I am less fond of these books that I had been, having been treated to the same lines so many times before.

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