How the Light Gets In is the ninth episode in the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series, set in the Eastern Townships region of rural Quebec, southeast of Montreal and just north of Vermont. Armand Gamache works for the Surete du Quebec, the provincial police force based in Montreal, and he often investigates crimes that occur in or around the remote village of Three Pines.

It's winter, coming into Christmas, and the Quebec landscape is blanketed in white. But dark times have descended upon Gamache and his team of homicide investigators. The internal administrative strife that had been previously lurking in the background has now moved front and center and has taken over the Surete office. The friction began with the Arnot case (which took place before we met Gamache in the first book) and picked up after the factory raid (which happened between books five and six). Now it is pointedly affecting Gamache's team and its caseload. Jean-Guy Beauvoir has been reassigned to another department. Inspector Isabelle Lacoste has stepped into his second-in-command role. The remainder of their usual agents have been scattered to other roles, and the others who remain seem more disrespectful than ever before. The higher-ups are "rewarding" Gamache by giving him crap and crappy investigators. Can he get to the root of this problem, somehow?

Nevertheless, the Chief Inspector makes time for Three Pines bookseller Myrna Landers when she asks him to check on a missing friend, Constance Pineault. It turns out that Constance was a member of the once-famous Ouellet family of Quebec. And when Gamache learns that she has been murdered, he must figure out how much her family connections had to do with her fate. Once again, as he returns to Three Pines, he chats with the locals, who have now become his friends and allies. Clara Morrow is again a key person, although now, she's on her own. Since we last visited her and husband Peter, they have split up for a year-long voluntary separation. (We could have guessed that this would happen, at the end of book seven.)

Louise Penny uses the third-person point of view to let us drop in on conversations away from Gamache's ears. We are permitted to glean some of what's going on behind the scenes at the Surete, but not all. We get enough to realize the seriousness of the situation and to hope that Gamache will be able to somehow withstand the results. It feels as though we have all fallen into a parallel and darker universe, like Marty McFly does in Back to the Future II. Will Gamache be successfully diminished by his own administrators? Or is he savvy enough to somehow shake off this dark veil for good? You know he's reached a certain point in his response when he brings in "iffy" agent Yvette Nichol for assistance. (See her escapades in books one, two, three and six.)

When you reach the three-quarter point of the novel, around page 300, you'd better put the book aside to make your last trips to the bathroom and to the kitchen. Because once you pick it back up again, you'll want to stay in your seat with this story until the very end.

How the Light Gets In is among the most compelling episodes in a compelling series. And you shouldn't drop into it without having experience with these characters. Start with the first book, Still Life, or if you can't go back that far for some reason, start at least with the fifth book, Bury Your Dead. Backstories and information accumulate in these stories, and you will be the better for knowing them if you have the full picture in your head. Go Gamache!