The Madness Of Crowds Pdf is a Canada Crime Mystery Thriller novel By Louise Penny. It is the Seventeenth book in the Captivating Inspector Armand Gamache.
The Madness Of Crowds Book Summary
Time and again, as the New Year approaches, that charge is leveled against Armand Gamache. It starts innocently enough.
While the residents of the Québec village of Three Pines take advantage of the deep snow to ski and toboggan, to drink hot chocolate in the bistro and share meals together, the Chief Inspector finds his holiday with his family interrupted by a simple request. He’s asked to provide security for what promises to be a non-event. A visiting Professor of Statistics will be giving a lecture at the nearby university.
While he is perplexed as to why the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec would be assigned this task, it sounds easy enough. That is until Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture.
They refuse, citing academic freedom, and accuse Gamache of censorship and intellectual cowardice. Before long, Professor Robinson’s views start seeping into conversations. Spreading and infecting. So that truth and fact, reality and delusion are so confused it’s near impossible to tell them apart.
Discussions become debates, debates become arguments, which turn into fights. As sides are declared, a madness takes hold. Abigail Robinson promises that, if they follow her, ça va bien aller. All will be well. But not, Gamache and his team know, for everyone.
When a murder is committed it falls to Armand Gamache, his second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and their team to investigate the crime as well as this extraordinary popular delusion. And the madness of crowds.
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The Madness Of Crowds pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Minotaur Books; First Edition (August 24, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 448 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250145260
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250145260
- Item Weight : 1.41 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.6 x 1.4 x 9.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #16,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #131 in Traditional Detective Mysteries (Books)
- #134 in International Mystery & Crime (Books)
- #1,678 in Suspense Thrillers
- Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 29,328 ratings
The Madness Of Crowds Book Reviews
VINE VOICE
4.0 out of 5 stars A good story, but it might have needed a simpler plot line
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 6, 2021
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A new Inspector Armand Gamache mystery novel by Louise Penny is an event. Each story generally goes right to the top of the bestsellers’ lists, and with good reason. Gamache, his Quebec Surete colleagues, and his neighbors in the village of three Pines have legions of fans worldwide. And his fans have followed Gamache through thick and thin, from Montreal to Paris, from his unmasking political skullduggery at the highest levels of Canadian provincial government to his nearly dying.
We love Gamache and how he solves mysteries. We love his colleagues Isabel Lacoste and Jean-guy Beauvoir, who also happens to be his son-in-law. We love Gamache’s wife, Reine-Narie. And the Three Pines neighbors: bistro owners Olivier and Gabri, poet Ruth Zardo and her foul-mouthed duck Rosa, artist Clare Morrow, and bookstore operator Myrna.
“The Madness of Crowds” is the seventeenth Gamache novel, and it helps to know two things about the book. It was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was written before the emergence of the delta variant of COVID. It is set just after the pandemic has ended, with the widespread availability of vaccines. The people are Three Pines are coming together for a Christmas and New Year’s celebration, the first such celebration post-pandemic.
Joining the celebration is a Sudanese woman nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, one who endured mass rape, torture, and disfigurement to go on to create a foundation for women and children. She is a worldwide celebrity, and the residents of Three Pines are initially thrilled. Until they get to know her, and discover that sainthood often involves a brutal, caustic personality.
Gamache is called to a local university, to provide security for a speaker with unpopular views, in this case, the articulation of support for eugenics and the “culling” of the population, particularly during events like pandemics. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, eugenics was especially popular in the late nineteenth and first-half of the twentieth centuries. In the United States, it was associated with Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. In Europe, it was associated with Nazi theories of racial superiority, and it was the Holocaust that dealt what many thought was a death blow to eugenics. Biotechnology, however, has brought it back, although in a different form and using different names.
It is a woman professor from British Columbia whom Gamache must protect, even as he finds what she says and believes to be abhorrent. Contributing to this abhorrence is that fact that Gamache’s baby granddaughter Idola, the child of Jean-Guy and Gamache’s daughter Annie, has Down’s Syndrome.
Penny swirls all these currents and crosscurrents together, in the way only she can, to tell a fascinating story. Except something seems slightly off-kilter in The Madness of Crowds, and it’s not easy to say specifically what it is. It may be the disconnect of writing about a pandemic that has supposedly just passed, when the reader’s current reality is that COVID-19 is still very much with us. It may be that it takes several chapters before the reader knows what, exactly, are the controversial views the characters find to be so hateful. It may be that the murder, when it does finally occur well into the story, is connected to human experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. Using these experiments, the question of eugenics, and Sudanese atrocities as narrative devices in the novel runs the risk of a story without a center, and the book comes close to that.
There’s also a sense that the author did not deal well with what happened during the first year of COVID-19, and it surfaces several times in the experiences of her characters. It is Gamache’s wife who tell us what happened to her husband and son-in-law during the lockdown; Gamache and Jean-Guy make little reference to it.
I love the Gamache stories. I’ve been amazed with the first 16 books and how Penny consistently wrote on exceptional mystery novel after another. “The Madness of Crowds” is a good story, but it might have needed a simpler plot line; the story of the Sudanese woman, for example, could have been a separate Gamache story all to itself. But we remain faithful to the inspector, his colleagues, his family, and his friends.
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and Well
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 29, 2022
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Rarely can a book grab my attention and my heart as a Louise Penny Inspector Gamache novel.can. The twists and turns of this intelligent book were so satisfying. The characters were most endearing and engaging. Beautifully and well-written!
5.0 out of 5 stars SO GOOD. Louise Penny is my queen.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 20, 2022
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Louise Penny is one of my favorite authors. I always look forward to reading her books and I do so more sparingly than I would prefer so I always have one waiting on deck in the event I need to go to a comforting and engaging place.
Some Gamache novels are slow to get going but this one is not. Engaging and intriguing from the start, the urgency and curiosities pick up pace and don’t stop until the very end. I loved the introduction of a new friend for the Three Pines gang. I really hope we see more of her.
About Louise Penny Author Of The Madness Of Crowds Pdf Book
Louise Penny Author Of The Madness Of Crowds Pdf is the author of the #1 New York Times and Globe and Mail bestselling series of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels. She has won numerous awards, including a CWA Dagger and the Agatha Award (seven times), and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. In 2017, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture. Louise lives in a small village south of Montréal.
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