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

by Louise Penny

Knowledge wasn’t always power. Sometimes it was crippling.

The illusion shattered. That was the price of looking at things too closely.

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.

But they both knew that words were weapons too, and when fashioned into a story their power was almost limitless.

Clara knew that grief took a terrible toll. It was paid at every birthday, every holiday, each Christmas. It was paid when glimpsing the familiar handwriting, or a hat, or a balled-up sock. Or hearing a creak that could have been, should have been, a footstep. Grief took its toll each morning, each evening, every noon hour as those who were left behind struggled forward.

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.

“There’ve been weapons since there’s been man,” said Delorme. “Neanderthals had them. It’s the nature of the beast.