It’s a Mystery: “Fear is a contagious disease”
/The Frozen Dead
Fear struck them head on like a locomotive at full steam…. It looked like a giant butterfly, a dark, evil butterfly staining the whiteness of snow and sky…. The cabin was preparing to stop. They were nearly there. The shape grew larger…. It was no butterfly; nor was it a bird. The cabin stopped; the doors opened automatically.… But no one got out. They stood there staring at this work of madness and death.
One of them, Huysmans, grabs the headphones and rams them over his ears.
“Is that the main station? Huysmans here! Call the gendarmerie, quick! Tell them to get up here right away. There’s a dead body. The sickest thing you’ve ever seen!”
Commandant Martin Servaz, the lead investigator in the Toulouse crime unit, is summoned. He is more than a little annoyed to be pulled off of his current homicide case, a homeless man beaten to death by three teenagers. Still his anger is tempered by curiosity as he navigates the roads beneath the unforgiving mountain. Finally his jeep reaches the car park and he hastens into the adjacent titanic stone building that houses the power plant. There he is confronted by a familiar voice:
“Servaz!”A voice rolling through the foyer like a snow cannon. Servaz turned towards the figure heading in his direction. A tall slender woman in her fifties, elegantly dressed…. Catherine d’Humières had come in person, instead of sending one of her deputies: Servaz felt a sudden rush of adrenaline…. People who did not know her were intimidated. As were those who knew her.… She had become head of the public prosecutor’s office five years earlier and Servaz was sure she did not intend to stop there. He was convinced that in the next year or two she would make presiding judge at a more important tribunal…. They headed towards a glassed-in cubicle.
In the middle is a small group. D’Humières makes the introductions, ending with Captain Irène Ziegler, from the research unit in Pau:
“Commandant Servaz and Captain Ziegler will be handling the Investigation jointly.”Servaz saw Captain Ziegler’s fine face crumple…. An investigation that was handled jointly by the police and the gendarmerie was an inexhaustible source of quarrels, rivalry and withholding of evidence—but that too was a sign of the times.
Once he learns the corpse is a headless horse, he is incredulous. It does anything but calm him to learn it’s a very valuable thoroughbred belonging to the multinational magnate Eric Lombard. It’s info that puts all of his cop’s senses on high alert:
So that’s it, he thought. Eric Lombard, the son of Henri Lombard and grandson of Edouard Lombard…a financial dynasty, captains of industry, entrepreneurs who had reigned over this patch of the Pyrenees, over the département and even over the region, for six decades or more. With obviously unlimited access to all the chambers of power. In this part of the world, Eric Lombard’s thoroughbreds were indisputably more important than some murdered homeless man.
Adding a darker dimension to this already bizarre scenario is the fact that they are not far from the Wargnier Institute. It’s an asylum full of dangerous lunatics, a psychiatric establishment that is unique in Europe—where they lock up murderers who have been judged insane. By implication, this description made me shudder. How to judge the many others who have committed the not so simple art of murder?
How is it possible that nobody heard or saw anything, either at the riding academy or the power plant? You don’t drag a dead horse around like that in the middle of the night.
This question is partially answered when the horse’s head is found in Lombard’s stables. (Where to hide a tree but in a forest?) It’s immediately clear that the animal was drugged before he was beheaded. But there are dogs on the grounds that were not drugged. Why? And there is an alarm system that wasn’t triggered. Plus there were two men on the premises: Marchand Lombard’s steward and a groom. They claim that all they heard are the stable’s usual night sounds.No surprise, any attempts at extracting information from the men who are connected to the plant, including the five who discovered the body, meet with hostile resistance. It’s as though, Servaz concludes, they’ve been programmed. But by whom? Eric Lombard has been out of the country. In fact, the day after their grisly discovery, d’Humières informs him that Eric Lombard is on his way back from the US and wants to speak to the investigators without delay. And she makes it patently clear that it’s not an invitation, it’s an order.Lombard turns out to be as imperious and intransigent as you would expect a billionaire in his position to be. Still, he can turn on the charm. When Servaz suggests that organized crime might be involved, he brings up The Godfather/horse’s head connection. Then airily dismisses it with amused contempt: “We’re dealing with dictatorships, not the mafia.”His parting message to them is anything but amused:
“I have been assured that you are excellent investigators…. If it should prove otherwise, if you are negligent in any way, if you treat this matter in an offhand manner on the pretext that it’s only a horse, I will be merciless.”
They leave Lombard’s palatial lair with a sense of profound unease. They can ignore Lombard’s not so veiled threat, but it’s their perception that everything about the tycoon is off kilter by design that has them on edge. But before they have time to absorb this, the DNA analysis comes back. Some saliva on the cabin’s windowsill is shockingly identified.It belongs to Julian Hirtmann, housed in Unit A of Wargnier. He is one of the world’s most infamous serial killers. The author says he’s an homage to Hannibal Lecter and to one of the first supervillains of crime, Professor Moriarty. Let me warn you, Hirtmann’s M.O. is so heinous it makes Lecter and the Professor look almost tame—almost. As for Unit A, here is how Dr. Xavier describes it to Diane Berg, the young psychiatrist who has just arrived at the Institute:
“Before you go into unit A, there is one thing you must understand, Mademoiselle Berg: there is nothing left to frighten those seven men. Not even solitary confinement. They are in their own world; nothing can reach them. Get this into your head: You have never met patients like them. Ever.”
This leads to a fairly complicated parallel story that involves Berg and Xavier and the ethical breaches she uncovers. And in another twist, there is her relationship with Hirtmann. It’s the stuff of folktales—think Beauty and the Beast.Pivotal, of course, is the DNA that Servaz and Ziegler must grapple with. Never have two people been made more aware of the acuity of Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”The pervasiveness of evil in this harrowing novel makes for a mesmerizing read. Minier brings the horrific to our doorstep and we are unable to back away. From the beginning, the sense of menace is visceral, immediate and gut wrenching. We are set up to expect the unexpected, and it is delivered in spades. The Frozen Dead is not to be missed.
Armand Gamache had seen the worst. But he’d also seen the best. Often in the same person…. Those days were behind him now. Now he could rest… And worry about his own soul. …Turmoil shook loose all sorts of unpleasant truths. But it took peace to examine them. Sitting in this quiet place in the bright sunshine, Armand Gamache was finally free to examine all the things that had fallen to the ground. As he had fallen.
Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s former second-in-command, is now married to Gamache’s daughter Annie. Jean-Guy seems to be working hard to kick the addictions that plagued him for so long. Their relationship, which had suffered such brutal upheavals, is now back on track and each man is grateful for this. So when Gamache agrees to come to the aid of his old friend, artist Clara Morrrow (no rest for the weary even in Gamache’s new world), he enlists Jean-Guy’s help.Clara is worried about her husband, fellow artist Peter. A year ago he was behaving so badly towards her that Clara asked him to leave. Withal, they made a promise to each other: No contact until the first anniversary of his leaving, when Peter would come back and they’d see where they were. But he never showed up. That was a few weeks ago:
She felt such a fool now. She’d imagined him arriving, seeing her and taking her in his arms. Actually, in her more melodramatic moments, she saw him bursting into tears and begging her forgiveness for being such a shit…. But what preoccupied her now was what had happened to Peter. The question occupied her head, then took over her heart, and now it held her completely hostage.
She must take comfort in the fact that Gamache has promised to find him. He is a man of his word. He is well aware that Peter is a flawed individual. He, who is, at this juncture, in flight, unpredictable, erratic. But Gamache is convinced that Peter is also a man of his word. As he tells her:
…if he couldn’t for some reason show up in person he’d have called, or emailed or written a letter.But nothing had come. Not a word.
Gamache and Beauvoir set out to follow what can only be described as Peter’s idiosyncratic trail. They’ve also, unhappily, got Clara and her best friend Myrna (a former eminent psychologist who retired to run the village bookstore). Neither would take no for an answer, ignored warnings, entreaties, negative vibes and forcefully insinuated themselves into the search.It’s a mystery tour, but hardly magical. From Europe, Paris, Florence and then Venice, Peter went to Dumfries in southwest Scotland where there is magic in The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. It’s a garden inspired by science and mathematics, with sculptures and landscape on these themes. Gamache et al are both puzzled and intrigued. Cosmic—they hone in on that word. But there are no answers, only questions. They go back to Canada and into Toronto where Peter visited his former art teacher, Professor Massey, who also taught Clara. He was their favorite professor. He is a weird, very secretive old bird. He knows more than he’s telling.A series of paintings Peter mailed to his niece Bean sets off their collective reactions as though they were a Rorschach test. They reveal a man in torment, racked by doubt. Although unsettling, they act as a catalyst to what turns out to be their final destination, a place Gamache knows well and where he conducted some very difficult investigations: the wilds of the upper St. Lawrence. As Gamache and Myrna stand at the railing of the boat that has taken them there,he looks at Myrna:
“Do you know what Jacques Cartier called this stretch of coast?”“Cartier the explorer?”“Yes, back in the early fifteen hundreds. When he first saw this place he called it ‘the land God gave to Cain.’”…“Cain. The first murderer,” said Myrna.“A coast so forbidding, so hostile it was fit only for the damned,” said Gamache.
Evil is palpable here, permeating the air. In search of artistic inspiration, Peter may have found something different and deadly!No one quite evokes the sense of place like Louise Penny. In The Long Way Home she ever so skillfully combines that evocation with powerful psychological insights into the ways that artists deal with success, their own and their significant others’. In Penny’s sure hands, the crime novel becomes the instrument for exploring social justice and universal truths about human behavior, while beautifully telling a memorable story. It’s another winner from this truly marvelous writer.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.
