Kingdom of the Blind

Kingdom of the Blind is a novel in Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, translated into Chinese by Chen Lei. The story turns on two threads. First, Gamache receives an invitation to a derelict farmhouse outside Three Pines, where, together with Myrna Landers, the village bookseller, and a young builder, he is named executor of the will of an old woman none of them has ever met. The beneficiaries and terms of the will are so strange that everyone else assumes the testator was not of sound mind; Gamache keeps asking: what if she was entirely lucid? When a body is found in the village, the will suddenly takes on a threatening cast. Second, Gamache has been suspended over an operation six months earlier, and the investigation drags on through deep winter; a large quantity of an anesthetic—enough to kill thousands—that should have been intercepted has reached Montreal and is about to appear on the streets. To recover the drugs he takes ever bolder, at times near-desperate measures, and in the process is forced to see his own “blind spots” and what hides within them. Set against a Quebec village in deep winter, the novel pairs a story of inheritance and family secrets with one of responsibility and cost inside the police force, weaving small-town mystery and big-city drug enforcement into a single current.