The past casts its tendrils over the present for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, a man who had “chosen to spend his adult life tracking killers, looking into the minds of madmen”, when a young man he saved from a life of abuse and poverty reappears after many years. Sam and his sister, Fiona, were only children when their mother was murdered; today, they are troubled, damaged adults and Gamache is not sure of their intentions when they arrive in his village home of Three Pines. Then the inspector and his local friends discover a bricked-up attic room filled with macabre secrets and puzzles and suddenly the clock is ticking as Gamache ponders the unthinkable possibility that one of his oldest enemies has escaped from prison. “This chain of events had begun years earlier and was inexorable. If not fated, then preordained by some rough beast.”
