Miss Wolcott's Ghost (Chief Inspector Gamache 21)Audiobook

Louise Penny

A phone call at four in the morning, a body in a cemetery nobody can find

Three Pines at four in the morning is silent, which is why the phone wakes Gamache so completely. A voice he does not recognise says something about a body in Lost Nation, and then the line dies, and he is left with a name he cannot place and the certainty that whoever called was in fear of his life. The number, when it is traced, belongs to the house next door.

What he finds in the woods makes no sense in the present tense: a man dressed for a century he did not live in, lying on a grave that carries a date and no name, in a cemetery nobody has used in decades. From there the case pulls in a lost ship, the papers of a Victorian botanist with unusual hobbies and a plant nobody has recorded since, and it starts to look as though the Morrow family has been carrying something for a very long time.

Audiobook review by Emma Lawson

★★★★★

Alfred Molina reads Gamache, and the result is the best Penny in years

There is a version of this series that is a cosy village mystery with good food and better manners, and there is the version Louise Penny actually writes, in which the village is a place people come to because something happened to them elsewhere. This is firmly the second kind. It opens with a terrified phone call at four in the morning and spends thirteen hours pulling on a thread that goes back a century, and Alfred Molina, who played Gamache on screen, reads it as a man who already knows how the character thinks rather than one who is discovering him. Kirkus gave the performance its Earphones award, and having listened to it, that was not generosity.

The central idea is a good one for this series: a place that exists in local memory and nowhere else. Lost Nation gives Penny a way to write about secrecy inside a small community without repeating the plots she has done before, and the opening third, with Gamache and his team walking into woods at night looking for a corpse that has been waiting a century, is as atmospheric as anything she has written.

What lifts it above a standard entry is Clara Morrow. She is one of the best characters in modern crime fiction and this book finally puts her at the centre of the mystery rather than at its edge, and the scenes between her and Gamache, in which two old friends are careful with each other because they both know more than they are saying, are the reason to listen to this one twice.

The Molina narration is the other reason. He does not do an old man's voice and he does not do a French-Canadian accent for show; he plays Gamache as someone who is polite by conviction and dangerous by experience, and the register barely changes when the book gets violent. His Beauvoir is younger and more impatient, his Lacoste clipped and practical, and the acknowledgements at the end are read by Penny herself, which is a nice touch on a book about the things families keep.

The Victorian layer is where it wobbles for me. The botanist, the ship and the plant that might save or take countless lives is a lot of machinery, and in the middle third the plot has to spend real time assembling it, with documents and explanations that slow the audio down. At thirteen and a half hours this is one of the longer Gamache novels, and the tea-room feeling of the middle chapters does not help. I would not cut a scene involving Clara, but I would cut twenty minutes of the archive.

That said, the last act earns it back, and the note it ends on is one of the more generous ones she has written. If you have never tried a Gamache novel, you can start here, although you will spoil yourself on earlier books. If you are a regular, this is comfortably better than the last two. The site has The Grey Wolf, the nineteenth in the series, for comparison.

Louise Penny Miss Wolcott's Ghost Armand Gamache Three Pines Alfred Molina free audiobook

Miss Wolcott's Ghost is the twenty-first Gamache novel. A phone call in the middle of the night says there is a body in Lost Nation and then goes dead, and Armand Gamache has no idea where Lost Nation is. He and his team find a corpse in an abandoned cemetery, a man from another century lying on a grave with a date and no name, and the trail runs through a lost ship, a Victorian botanist and a plant nobody has seen in a hundred years. Thirteen hours and forty-two minutes, read by Alfred Molina.

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Molina played Gamache on television and it shows in the best way: the voice is settled, unhurried and never theatrical, which is exactly right for a book about a man who believes politeness is a weapon. The runtime is generous and the story opens with something genuinely unsettling, so it works as a first Gamache as well as a return visit. The author reads the closing acknowledgements herself.

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