*Starred Review* Until now, Penny's challenge in her best-selling Armand Gamache series was to imagine new ways to take the chief inspector of the Surete du Quebec from his Montreal home to the vividly evoked village of Three Pines, the author's setting of choice. Now, with Gamache retired to Three Pines, there is a new challenge: coming up with reasons to get her hero out of town. No challenge is too great for Penny, as skillful a plotter as she is a marvelous creator of landscape and character. Still grieving over the carnage that wreaked havoc with those he loves and with Three Pines itself (How the Light Gets In, 2013), Gamache reluctantly agrees to come to the aid of his friend, artist Clara Morrow, who is worried about her husband, fellow artist Peter, who has failed to return to Three Pines after their agreed-upon one-year separation. Gamache and his former assistant, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, follow Peter's trail to Europe and back to Toronto, where he visited his former art teacher, and on to the remote mouth of the St. Lawrence River. In search of artistic inspiration, Peter may have found something very different and much more lethal. As always, Penny dexterously combines suspense with psychological drama, overlaying the whole with an all-powerful sense of landscape as a conduit to meaning. The wilds of the upper St. Lawrence, once called the land God gave to Cain, combine echoes of mysticism with portents of evil, permeating the air with the same violent forces that roil within the characters. Another gem from the endlessly astonishing Penny. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Penny appears to have reserved a lifetime seat atop best-seller lists everywhere, and, with the appearance of her latest, she will take her place once again.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist

Starred Review. Penny (How the Light Gets In) again engages her wonderfully drawn characters in a psychological mystery. Ralph Cosham returns as narrator, mesmerizing listeners as he spins Penny's tale of the search for local man Peter Morrow. Armand Gamache, now a contentedly retired member of the Three Pines community, is drawn into the mystery by Peter's wife, Clara, when Peter does not reappear as promised after a one-year separation. Penny's gift of incorporating spirituality, philosophy, occasional glimpses of magical realism, and, above all, fine character development into an intriguing psychological mystery results in a breathtaking conclusion. Don't be surprised if you really catch your breath and shed a tear or two. VERDICT A marvelous entry in a continually amazing series. Recommended to those who enjoy the character development, intricate plotting, and psychological elements in novels by Charles Todd, Craig Johnson, and Colin Dexter. ["Each inhabitant of Three Pines is a distinct individual, and the humor that lights the dark places of the investigation is firmly rooted in their long friendships, or, in some cases, frenemyships," read the starred review of the Minotaur: St. Martin's hc, LJ 7/14.]-Sandra C. Clariday, Tennessee Wesleyan Coll., Athens (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Officially retired, former chief of homicide Armand Gamache is at his beloved Quebec village of Three Pines, healing in mind and body after his ordeal in 2013's How the Light Gets In, when a neighbor, celebrated artist Clara Morrow, asks him to find her estranged husband. Peter Morrow, also an artist, had departed Three Pines the previous year, promising to return on a specific day to discuss the status of their marriage. He didn't make it and Clara is concerned. So is Gamache, who, as Penny has it, sees the shadow of murder even on sunny days. Thus begins a long, long journey during which Gamache, his loyal former assistant and now son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Clara, and some of the other delightfully eccentric villagers have an assortment of adventures. Cosham, who has been this series' narrator for a while, has a comforting, avuncular British accent. To this he smoothly blends in a French influence that becomes more apparent in his pronunciation of Canadian names, places, and Quebecois dialogue. Cosham voices Gamache with a wary, almost fearful caution as he approaches the new case, but as the search for the missing painter goes from Toronto to Paris to a desolate spot on the St. Lawrence River, his voice grows stronger as his energy level rises. Jean-Guy, too, sounds more assertive and alive. Cosham's vocal interpretations are mainly subtle-Clara, for example, doesn't sound very different from Gamache's wife, Raine-Marie-but his version of the village's eccentric old poet, Ruth, has a distinctive sharpness not unlike that of the latter day Katharine Hepburn. A Minotaur hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

This remarkable expedition takes us miles away from the home base of the traditional village mystery and into the far-off land of the odyssey. For that seems to be what Peter has undertaken in his solitary travels from Quebec City to Toronto to Paris to Scotland and to a wild and remote stretch of the St. Lawrence River known as "the land God gave to Cain." That is, the heroic quest to reinvent himself as an artist and claim a new identity as "a brave man in a brave country." In another departure from genre convention, the murder that usually opens the narrative doesn't come until the end. But the execution of it is both creative and diabolical, a thematically satisfying finish for a story that sets out to probe the mysteries of the artistic process. While Penny has thoughtful things to say about the evolution of an artist's style, she's even more keen to examine the dark side of an artist's sensibility. As someone observes of the professional jealousy that corrupted Peter, "It's like drinking acid and expecting the other person to die." And what an artistic way that is to commit murder-suicide. IN THRILLER LAND, there ÍS something very dangerous and sexy about the teacher-pupil dynamic, especially where guns are involved. Jack Reacher, the massive hunk of a hero who travels light and flies solo in Lee Child's action-heavy novels, is burdened by a sidekick in PERSONAL (Deiacorte, $28). That doesn't stop this former Army M.P. from carrying out an assignment that takes him from Arkansas to London, where a crack sniper has fixed his sights on the world leaders at a planned G-8 conference. But Casey Nice, the green C.I.A. officer attached to this mission, is such an empty vessel you keep expecting an alien to pop out of her rib cage. Reacher is always up for a good fight, most entertainingly when he goes mano a mano with a seven-foot, 300-pound monster of a mobster named Little Joey. But it's Reacher the Teacher who wows here, instructing Casey Nice and us in the assets of the AK-47 and the properties of bulletproof glass, while passing on neat tricks like how to stroll through airport security, buy a gun when you're out of town and smash a guy's nose with your elbow. NO ONE COULD possibly have a more refined grasp of social status than the 16-year-old schoolgirls in Tana French's perceptive psychological suspense novel the SECRET PLACE (Viking, $27.95) - except, perhaps, the two Dublin police officers who turn up at their private school to reopen the investigation into the unsolved murder of a popular student at a nearby boys' academy. Antoinette Conway, the lead detective on the year-old case, comes fully armored with the underdog attitude of a tough kid from the slums. Stephen Moran, the sensitive young cop from a working-class background who narrates the procedural aspects of the story, arrives at St. Kilda's College with stars in his eyes. "It was beautiful," he says of the elegant mansion. "I love beautiful." He also appreciates the beauty of a friendship that enfolds four "enchanted girls" in a magical circle that protects them from the cruelties of a girls' boarding school. With her awesome facility at girl-speak, French constructs an idiom that is clever and crude and vulgar and vicious in one breath and deeply, profoundly tragic in the next. WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER, who draws his stories from Indian life and legend in the rugged north woods of Minnesota, writes with fresh passion and purpose in WINDIGO ISLAND (Atria, $24.99) about the local sex trade. When the body of a 14-year-old runaway from the Bad Bluff Chippewa reservation in Wisconsin washes up on an uninhabited island in Lake Superior, a frightened family begs good-guy Cork O'Connor to find the girl who ran away with her. Since most runaways head for Duluth, that's where Cork and the relatives go for a fast and brutal education in how the traffickers procure, groom, brainwash and turn the girls into prostitutes to service the men who sail into the huge harbor of "the Emerald City." Krueger has always written sympathetically about conditions on the reservations that make native children feel their lives are hopeless. Now he tells us that to human predators their lives are actually worthless.

Armand Gamache, former chief inspector of homicide for the Sret du Qubec, is settling into retirement in the idyllic village of Three Pinesbut Gamache understands better than most that danger never strays far from home. With the help of friends and chocolate croissants and the protection of the village's massive pines, Gamache is healing. His hands don't shake as they used to; you might just mistake him and his wife, Reine-Marie, for an ordinary middle-age couple oblivious to the world's horrors. But Gamache still grapples with a "sin-sick soul"he can't forget what lurks just beyond his shelter of trees. It's his good friend Clara Morrow who breaks his fragile state of peace when she asks for help: Peter, Clara's husband, is missing. After a year of separation, Peter was scheduled to return home; Clara needs to know why he didn't. This means going out there, where the truth awaitsbut are Clara and Gamache ready for the darkness they might encounter? The usual cast of characters is here: observant bookseller Myrna; Gamache's second in command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir; even the bitter old poet, Ruth, is willing to lend a hand to find Peter, an artist who's lost his way. The search takes them across Quebec to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, toward another sin-sick soul, one fighting to claw his way out of jealousy's grasp. Penny develops the story behind Peter's disappearance at a slow, masterful pace, revealing each layer of the mystery alongside an introspective glance at Gamache and his comrades, who can all sympathize with Peter's search for purpose. The emotional depth accessed here is both a wonder and a joy to uncover; if only the different legs of Peter's physical journey were connected as thoughtfully as his emotional one. Gamache's 10th outing (How the Light Gets In, 2013, etc.) culminates in one breathless encounter, and readers may feel they weren't prepared for this story to end. The residents of Three Pines will be back, no doubt, as they'll have new wounds to mend. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.