The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #5)

by Louise Penny

“I think so too.” The phone rang again. It was a sound they knew well. Somehow different from other phones. It was the ringing that announced a death.

Gamache knelt down and looked closely at the old man’s face again. It was weathered and withered. An almanac face, of sun and wind and cold. A seasoned face.

His name isn’t ‘Young.’ That’d be weird. His name’s Havoc.”

In Beauvoir’s experience Darwin was way wrong. The fittest didn’t survive. They were killed by the idiocy of their neighbors, who continued to bumble along oblivious.

Now he had her full attention. Not only because she wanted to know what had happened, but because anyone who’d get up at two in the morning to smack a melon in the dark deserved attention. Perhaps even medical attention.

If the light was just right, catching this slight young man’s face just so, he looked like an idiot.