Happily retired in the village of Three Pines, Armand Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide, has found a peace he'd only imagined possible. On warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands. "There is a balm in Gilead," his neighbor Clara Morrow reads from the dust jacket, "to make the wounded whole." While Gamache doesn't talk about his wounds and his balm, Clara tells him about hers. Peter,...

Lillian Dyson is dead. Chief Inspector Gamache, the head of homicide at the Surete du Quebec, is called to the tiny Quebec village and there he finds the art world gathered, and with it a world of shading and nuance, a world of shadow and light.

This is the final book of C. S. Lewis's acclaimed Cosmic (or Ransom) Trilogy, which includes Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. A classic work of fantasy as much for the wonder of its storytelling as for its insights into the human condition, the trilogy stages an epic battle between forces of light and darkness across a canvas of other worlds. In That Hideous Strength, the brave philologist Dr. Ransom (modeled after Lewis's friend J.R.R. Tolkien)...