Any fortune they might once have had has been stolen by the Nazis, but that does not keep the two branches of the family from fighting over it. They were a wealthy Austrian Jewish family, possibly related to the Rothschilds. Gamache’s investigation uncovers the history of the family, and it turns out that the dead woman might actually have been a baroness, but the family’s title and fortune are the object of a family feud that goes back over a hundred years. It turns out he was murdered before the house collapsed, and the murder was made to look like an accident. And then the farmhouse collapses and the body of the woman’s oldest son is found in the ruins.

In her will, she leaves a fortune, which she did not have, to her three adult children. Eventually he finds out that she was an eccentric cleaning woman who called herself the Baroness. His fellow executors are Myrna and a young builder named Benedict, who also did not know the dead woman. He receives a note asking him to meet someone at an abandoned, crumbling farmhouse, and finds that he has been named one of the executors of the will of a recently-deceased woman he never knew. Readers of Penny’s series think of the inhabitants of Three Pines as old friends: the artist Clara, the bookstore owner and former psychologist Myrna, Olivier and Gabri, who own the bistro and make delicious meals, and the cantankerous old poet Ruth and her pet duck Rosa.Īs Kingdom of the Blind begins, Gamache is on suspension from the Sûreté following the events of the previous summer, detailed in the previous volume, Glass Houses. Kingdom of the Blind is the latest in Louise Penny’s popular mystery series featuring Chief Superintendent Armand Gamache, former head of the Sûreté de Québec, who lives with his wife Reine-Marie in the tiny village of Three Pines.

Amelia choquet kingdom of the blind