The Nature of the Beast (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #11)

by Louise Penny

Nature, she knew, abhorred a vacuum, and these people, faced with an information vacuum, had filled it with their fears. The line between fact and fiction, between real and imagined, was blurring. The tether holding people to civil behavior was fraying. They could see it, and hear it, and feel it coming apart.

Were tired, and cold, and filled with fear and booze and not enough facts. These were good people, frightened people. Justifiably so.

He’d tried to explain to Jean-Guy that stillness wasn’t nothing. But the taut younger man just didn’t understand. And neither would he have, Gamache knew, in his thirties. But in his fifties Armand Gamache knew that sitting still was far more difficult, and frightening, than running around.

They looked again at the old village. And the tall pine trees planted for one purpose. To signal to those seeking sanctuary that they were safe. They’d made it to Three Pines.

Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it.