The Grey Wolf (14.5 hours), the action-packed latest addition to Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache series, takes the listener from the village of Three Pines to a medieval monastery, then back to cosmopolitan Montreal, as Armand Gamache and his colleagues face an ecoterrorism plot on a greater scale than anything they’ve encountered before.
All of the Gamache novels celebrate the francophone Québécois culture, so it is a little ironic that the previous audiobook narrators, Ralph Cosham and Robert Bathurst, were British actors. They both did an excellent job, but could not have accurately recreated the sound and texture of the characters’ voices—it’s to their credit that they didn’t try. However, the new narrator, Jean Brassard, a Québéc-born actor, brings an authentic Québécois accent to his performance without sacrificing clarity or enunciation, granting the listener the pleasure of hearing Gamache as he would really sound.
Read our starred review of the print version of The Grey Wolf.
