Louise Penny’s latest release, A Better Man, is the fifteenth installment in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. Even with the same tightly knit group of characters that are present in the previous fourteen tales, Penny never feels repetitive and never fails to offer a story that feels unique and new.

Tension abounds in this latest offering. Montréal and the small fictional community of Three Pines are threatened by the burgeoning river and catastrophic flooding. The malicious politics involved in Gamache’s demotion at Sûreté du Quebec have spiraled into a vicious social media campaign against him. And a pregnant woman who is the wife of an abusive man goes missing and is later found dead.

This is an atmospheric, layered story, and Penny’s unflinching but compassionate view of humanity is evident on the pages. A Better Man grapples with questions of morality, and at the heart of the story is the sense of family in the idyllic Three Pines and the wise, poetic man of unflinching character around whom the series revolves.