“In the kingdom of the blind, Amelia recited to herself as she trudged along— —the one-eyed man is king, Gamache read.”

Kingdom of the Blind, Louise Penny

Ever since How the Light Gets In, I’ve been waiting for the Inspector Gamache series to finish. But Louise Penny has always managed to write another great book in the series that kept me hooked. Kingdom of the Blind didn’t have the emotional intensity of the some of the previous books but it was still a great read.

In Kingdom of the Blind, Gamache is still feeling the effects of the previous novel. Placed on suspension, his days would be quiet if not for the fact that he was made the executor of a stranger’s will. The will is a strange one, bequeathing money and land that the deceased doesn’t have. But was the old woman crazy or is there something more at hand?

Concurrently, Gamache is hunting down the last of the drugs he let slip through while Jean-Guy faces a tough choice in his career.

I had to add in the sub-plot but if it sounds a bit jarring, that’s because it is. Previous books have managed to weave multiple storylines together seamlessly, but I found that Kingdom of the Blind stumbled a little when it came to this. I appreciated the murder mystery a lot more than the second plot about drug hunting, and it’s the subplot that I’ve been following for the last few books! Plus, the subplot tended towards the melodramatic at times, which was fine when the stake were high but didn’t contrast as well with the main murder this time.

Apart from the mystery of it all, I really appreciated how the book harkened back to the first few mysteries in the series. It’s Gamache, Jean-Guy, and Lacoste together, solving a crime. The last few books were very far reaching and very tense, but there’s also a lot to be had for them investigating a mystery and looking into the heart of murder – perhaps that’s why the subplot didn’t grab me as much this time.

Characters are mostly the same. If you’ve read the past few books, you’d have seen them develop. There aren’t many huge surprises here but it’s welcoming to see the villagers of Three Pines again.

Overall, I enjoyed this one. It’s not as breathtaking as some of the previous books in the series, especially if you compare it to Glass Houses, but it made me excited for the next book in the series and that is, I think, enough.

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