A Trick of the Light

Gamache is the series’ protagonist and the head of homicide of the Sûreté du Québec, the province’s police force. A Francophone, Gamache speaks English with a British accent as he attended Cambridge University. He is happily married to his wife Reine-Marie and has two children and several grandchildren. Well-read and intellectual, Gamache is deeply humane and especially close to his senior investigators, Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste. Many of Gamache’s cases take place in the small Québec village of Three Pines, where he has many friends.

Gamache deals with significant professional and personal trauma throughout the series, especially in the books prior to A Trick of the Light. He wrongfully arrests Olivier Brule for murder, then nearly dies during a raid tied to a terrorist attack. These events make him even more protective of his beloved subordinates, and somewhat more cautious in general. When Myrna Landers looks at him, she notices the “deep scar by his temple, below that scar his eyes were kindly” (245). Gamache works to repair his relationships with the villagers and with Beauvoir; he reflects that “some days were good, and some, like this, were not” (128). Part of Gamache’s struggle is his suspicion that the viral video of the warehouse raid points to a larger conspiracy against him within the Sûreté.