This turned out to be a surprisingly hard read. Not because it was bad (quite the opposite, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time) but because I got too excited about the ending. Even reading the last few chapters didn’t help, the tension was just that high.

In Glass Houses, Armand Gamache is finally the head of the Surete, which is a huge thing considering he started the series only as a Chief Inspector. Having ascended to the corrupted position, he finds that the inaction of his predecessors have led to the Surete almost losing the war on drugs – there is just one chance to turn things around.

That is the background to the murder case. A Comprador – a mysterious figure in black – was in Three Pines for a few days. They didn’t do anything wrong except scare people by their presence, but they still ended up dead. The trial for the murder of the comprador starts of the book and reveals the herculean task Gamache and his colleagues have been facing.

The one thing that struck me about this book is that Gamache, Jean-Guy, and the rest of the team were taken out of their comfort zones. The previous books have already established Gamache as a good man who searches the truth, but this book pits Gamache against the Law. His intentions are good, but is he doing good?

Although much of the action takes place in Three Pines, the people there don’t get as much growth in this book. They are familiar but they don’t learn much – the action is very much focused on the Surete this round. Instead, Three Pines as a whole functions as a haven for safety that was interrupted by a brutal murder (again).

I know that I’m about one or two books away from catching up to the series, but this is where I start having doubts about how far it can go. I’ve enjoyed these later books much more than the first few, but Gamache’s career can only take so many rises and falls (it already looks like a roller coaster) without becoming wholly unrealistic. The next book definitely has to live up to huge expectations; I’m getting nervous and I haven’t even started reading it!

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