Page 1

CHAPTER 1

“We have a problem.”

Now, weeks later, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache could not overstate what a huge understatement that had been. Though at the time, while it was clear something was off, it had seemed only that.

A slight odor. A scent, a sense of something going bad.

A problem.

Not a crisis. Not a looming catastrophe that put the poisoning plot, if not to shame, then into perspective.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste, his dual seconds-in-command at the Sûreté du Québec, had joined him in Three Pines in the small hours of that August morning, and together they’d reread and reread the second notebook, the one they’d underestimated, even dismissed.

The one they’d, he’d, assumed contained preliminary notes. Not the final, the fatal one, that had already killed so many.

When they’d arrived, Armand hadn’t told Jean-Guy and Isabelle what he thought. He wanted to see if they saw what he did. He knew the blast in Montréal’s water-treatment plant had severely affected his hearing. Maybe his other senses had also been jarred. So that he could no longer see and think clearly. Could no longer trust what his eyes, his common sense, his sixth sense, the tingling in his scalp told him.

But both Beauvoir and Lacoste, his best and brightest, had looked up and nodded.

“We have a problem,” they’d agreed.

He couldn’t actually hear the words over the scream of the millions of cicadas nesting in his head since the explosion, but he’d become adept at lip-reading. And if their mouths hadn’t told him, their eyes, their expressions, the sudden tension in their bodies did.

But still it was far from clear what they were now facing. What they’d missed, dismissed.

They only knew they’d been wrong about the order of the books the young biologist had hidden. They’d assumed the one outlining the poisoning plot was the second. The conclusion. The end.

But they were wrong. It was just the beginning.

Even now, weeks later, the exact threat was still concealed inside the words, the notations, the cryptic drawings and numbers that Charles Lang- lois had left behind. Before he’d been murdered. Mowed down within sight, within reach of Armand himself.

He’d died holding Armand’s hand. Clinging to his eyes. A young man, barely more than a boy, about to die.

When Armand had begged him for some clue, some idea, of what was happening, Charles had coughed up one blood-spattered word.

“Family.”

Nothing more.

Charles had been the first of many to die, some colluding in the poisoning plot, some trying to stop it, including the Grey Wolf himself. Giving his life to stop a catastrophe.

Dom Philippe was the one who’d first, years earlier on the shores of a pristine lake, told Armand the tale of the grey and black wolves, engaged in battle. The one advocating for decency, for peace, for civility and the courage to be kind. To forgive.

The other pressing forward with an agenda of hate, of aggression. Of retribution. Of a quest for power and domination, through fear. Through twisting the truth into a great lie, a great grievance.

Which one would win?

The Grey Wolf was gone. Murdered.

They’d thought the Black Wolf had been captured. But now, as Armand stepped out of the shower this early October morning, he was far from sure.

It was still dark outside when the head of homicide for the Sûreté wiped the condensation off the bathroom mirror and a man in his late fifties appeared, half his face covered in shaving cream. Though it happened each and every morning, the face that looked back could still surprise him.

Away from any reflection, he was in his early forties. But each morning he was reminded that was not actually true. And getting less true by the moment, he thought as he brushed grey hair, damp and askew from the shower, off his forehead, then continued to shave.

The creases that appeared with each stroke of the razor were more pronounced, etching deeper into his face with every year, every month, each day and concern.

He wondered what his father would have looked like, had he reached this age.