The Black Wolf
The Black Wolf (Chief Inspector Gamache, 20), Louise Penny. Minotaur Books (ISBN: 9781250328175) 2025.
Summary: Having arrested the “Black Wolf” trying to poison Montreal, Gamache realizes this was but a prelude to a greater threat.
If you read The Grey Wolf, you knew this book was coming. And if you did not, stop right here. That book gives the background for this, and this review gives details that will spoil the end of the Grey Wolf.
Gamache and his team have barely stopped an attempt to poison Montreal’s water supply as part of a power grab. The supposed mastermind, Marcus Lauzon, the Deputy Prime Minister, is now in solitary confinement. But Gamache, recovering at home, having lost his hearing due to a gun discharge meant to kill him, is beginning to doubt that the threat has been removed. They just may have been diverted off the trail of something bigger.
Not knowing who to trust, he has brought his closest associates, Beauvoir and LaCoste to Three Pines. Quietly, they have been studying the notebooks and a map left by slain biologist, Charles Langlois. But most of his notations are cryptic, and a laptop that may offer the key is still missing.
Another clue is equally puzzling. The Grey Wolf had given them this warning:
In a dry and parched land, where there is no water.
What that means, they have no clue. Canada has an abundance of water.
Slowly they piece together clues that convince them something bigger is going on. Woven into it are forest fires, atmospheric conditions, secret war plans and a treasonous international collaboration.
But back to Gamache’s doubts as to the identity of the Black Wolf. Is it Jeanne Caron, the popular current Prime Minister, a mob boss, or someone else? Or could it even be Lauzon? Penny tantalizes us with this throughout the book.
Like The Madness of Crowds, the book has surprised many readers with its prescience as to current events. In light of this, Penny includes an author note at the beginning of the book that she submitted the book to her publisher in September 2024, predating events that followed the U.S. presidential election in 2024. Most striking are her references to Canada as a “fifty-first state.”
It’s also striking that two meetings occur at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which straddles the US/Canada border. A black taped line runs through the middle of the building denoting the border. It has been a unique place where Canadians and Americans mix without checkpoints. Until this year. Now Canadians can’t enter the grand entrance on the US side without going through border control. An emergency exit on the Canada side serves as a temporary entrance.
Beyond details like this Penny explores our brave new social media world and its capacity for misinformation and deep fakes where interviews and videos can be doctored to say the opposite of what they were meant to reveal. In addition, Penny explores the international implications of climate-related events including fires, smoke pollution, and water shortages.
Like many of Penny’s books, this one has a hair-raising finish, one that stretched plausibility for me at points. However, one of the most interesting plot elements is that there is a point at which Gamache intentionally misleads Beauvoir. One senses that something shifts in their relationship. Plot material for a future book?
However, her larger scenario didn’t stretch plausibility. It was bleak and scarily realistic for me. It was only relieved by the beautifully ordinary life of Three Pines with an eccentric poet and her goose Rosa, and all the people who gather at the Bistro for exquisitely good food. Perhaps that is a parable of how we must live in our time. That is, we enjoy the good, true, and beautiful of the given day, thankful for and praying for the Gamaches that stand between us and annihilation.