After a year of separation, Peter was scheduled to return home Clara needs to know why he didn’t. It’s his good friend Clara Morrow who breaks his fragile state of peace when she asks for help: Peter, Clara’s husband, is missing. But Gamache still grapples with a “sin-sick soul”-he can’t forget what lurks just beyond his shelter of trees. His hands don’t shake as they used to you might just mistake him and his wife, Reine-Marie, for an ordinary middle-age couple oblivious to the world’s horrors. With the help of friends and chocolate croissants and the protection of the village’s massive pines, Gamache is healing. And there they discover the terrible damage done by a sin-sick soul.Armand Gamache, former chief inspector of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec, is settling into retirement in the idyllic village of Three Pines-but Gamache understands better than most that danger never strays far from home. To an area so desolate, so damned, the first mariners called it the land God gave to Cain. The journey takes them further and further from Three Pines, to the very mouth of the great St. A man so desperate to recapture his fame as an artist, he would sell that soul. And deeper and deeper into the soul of Peter Morrow.

Together with his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Myrna Landers, they journey deeper and deeper into Québec. '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. Having finally found sanctuary, Gamache feels a near revulsion at the thought of leaving Three Pines. Failed to show up as promised on the first anniversary of their separation. Peter, her artist husband, has failed to come home. While Gamache doesn't talk about his wounds and his balm, Clara tells him about hers. 'There is a balm in Gilead,' his neighbor Clara Morrow reads from the dust jacket, 'to make the wounded whole.' On warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands.

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.

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