Happily retired in the village of Three Pines, Armand
Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sûreté
du Québec, has found a peace he’d only imagined possible. On
warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small
book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands. “There is a
balm in Gilead,” his neighbor Clara Morrow reads from the
dust jacket, “to make the wounded whole.”
While Gamache doesn’t talk about his wounds and his balm,
Clara tells him about hers. Peter, her artist husband, has
failed to come home. Failed to show up as promised on the
first anniversary of their separation. She wants Gamache’s
help to find him. Having finally found sanctuary, Gamache
feels a near revulsion at the thought of leaving Three
Pines. “There’s power enough in Heaven,” he finishes the
quote as he contemplates the quiet village, “to cure a
sin-sick soul.” And then he gets up. And joins her.
Together with his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy
Beauvoir, and Myrna Landers, they journey deeper and deeper
into Québec. And deeper and deeper into the soul of Peter
Morrow. A man so desperate to recapture his fame as an
artist, he would sell that soul. And may have. The journey
takes them further and further from Three Pines, to the very
mouth of the great St. Lawrence river. To an area so
desolate, so damned, the first mariners called it The land
God gave to Cain. And there they discover the terrible
damage done by a sin-sick soul.