While the residents of the Québec village of Three Pines are skiing and tobogganing, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache finds his holiday interrupted by a simple request: to provide security for a visiting statistics professor lecturing at the university. In this 17th outing (after All the Devils Are Here), Professor Abigail Robinson has an agenda so hateful that it seems to poison everyone's outlook. When a murder is committed, Gamache and his team must investigate in an atmosphere of tension and anger, and even the inspector will face accusations of cowardice.