Imo, this is one of the best in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series.  Before I started this particular book, I think I’d read 16 of the 18 books to date. I ‘m not sure because for awhile I tried and tried to like them, but as long as Ralph Cosham was narrating I couldn’t understand them (I know I should have gotten the Kindle version to go with the Audible but that never occurred to me at the time. Huh???…  I know.). 

 Kingdom of the Blind
by Louise Penny 
2018 / 
Read by Robert Bathurst 
Rating – A+ / mystery-crime-thriller 
(#14 Three Pines/Gamache series)

Kingdom of the Blind has its own contained plot line dealing with a will from a rather eccentric old lady who lives near Three Pines. And she names Gamache, Myrna, and a man named Benedict as executors even though they don’t really know her at all. The executors find that the woman has left her estate to her three grown children, Anthony,  Caroline and Hugo Baumgartner.  But then they find out she’s trying to leave them millions of dollars which, unless something really weird is going on, she doesn’t have.  Of course one of them is murdered. 

Meanwhile the saga of Amelia continues. This is an overarching plot line for the series at this point. The street-smart addict Gamache brought into the Quebec police cadets a couple years prior was doing pretty well, but here she gets in a lot of trouble.   The name is Carfentanil and it’s generally  an elephant tranquilizer not approved for human use. It’s 10,000 x  more potent than morphine 100 x more powerful than fentanyl.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carfentanil

And now I have only one more book in the series and I’ll be caught up and ready for her new release this fall. (Because it was available at my library I got it.  I may take a break of about a week or so but I’ll get it done.)  I got way, way out of order for the series because I also started reading them as they were released starting with book #16, “All the Devils Are Here.”  I was going act the series from both ends for awhile. Whatever,  it worked.  

BUT!!!! I do NOT recommend this scattershot approach for anyone else. There”s a solid overarching plot line with characters being added and taken away from the cast regularly. The thing is that friends and family had all raved about these books and I knew if I could just get past the accent of Ralph Cosham I’d be okay. So I read the 1st 5 books thinking “this one will be better” before I started each one.  LOL!   Then Ralph died suddenly and a few months later Penny’s new one, “The Nature of the Beast” came out.  I waited a couple years I think it was, but I finally got #11  And after awhile I started #16, too, because the plot appealed to me.  

Overall, I wasn’t as thrilled with the books as I thought I should be, but they were enjoyable and  better than they’d been, so I kept going at the rate of about one a year while reading the books between #11 and 16 as I could get caught up (as best I could).  Some are definitely better than others and this is one of the best.