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Professor Massey is well-liked by the students-he is a kindly man, known for being a mentor to young artists.

The friends start making enquiries, and find that Peter has been to see his old professor, Paul Massey, who taught Peter and Clara at the Ontario College of Canadian Arts. Unlike Clara’s, whose portraits are much less technically proficient but are windows into the soul of the sitter. He is obsessive about order and his paintings reflect this: they are controlled, detailed and essentially soulless. He grew up with a domineering, vicious mother, who stifled his creativity. The missing Peter is the centre of the book, and Louise Penny slowly and skilfully builds up a picture of the man. He asks his son-in-law, Jean-Guy, who used to be his second-in-command, for help, and the group of friends try to track Peter down.

However, Peter, normally very meticulous, did not show up on the appointed day, nor did he call or write.Īrmand hates the thought of going back to the world he had left behind, but Clara is a friend. Exactly a year later, Peter was supposed to come back, and they would see how they felt. Upset at his lack of support, she suggested they take a year’s break from each other. An established artist when Clara became famous, Peter had trouble dealing with her success. Then one day she tells him that she is worried about her husband, Peter, who has disappeared. Every morning Clara sits next to him but does not say much.

There is Myrna, a psychologist who now runs a bookshop (and provides therapy to her friends), Clara, an artist, Ruth, a bad-tempered poet and her duck, Rosa (no one is sure whether it should be Ruth and her duck or Rosa and her human).Įvery morning, Armand sits on a bench overlooking the village with a book in his hand, The Balm of Gilead. But it is more than that-a story about losing and finding yourself, about art and landscape, and escaping from your past.Īrmand Gamache, the former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sureté du Quebec, has retired with his wife Reine-Marie to Three Pines, a village with other people like him-people who have left their pasts behind. On the surface, this seems like a regular whodunit. There’s power enough in Heaven to cure a sin-sick soul.” “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.