He claimed, however, that he had not killed her. Tracey was belligerent and admitted he beat his wife. The police received a warrant to search the house Vivienne shared with Tracey.

Gamache and the others learned from the local police that Vivienne had called several times to report her husband was being abusive, but she never filed charges. She had planned to come to her father’s house but never arrived. Vivienne’s father, Homer Godin, told officers that his daughter had called him on Saturday to tell him that she was finally leaving her abusive husband. When Beauvoir assigned Gamache to help Lysette look for the missing girl, the assignment could have been seen as a punishment, but Gamache accepted it gladly.Īs Gamache and Lysette set about investigating the disappearance of Vivienne Godin, Gamache warned Lysette and Isabel Lacoste, another officer who volunteered to work on the case, not to let their perceptions impact their ability to be unprejudiced. Officers were already uneasy as they wondered how Gamache would handle his demotion as well as the shared position with Beauvoir, an officer whom Gamache had mentored as Beauvoir worked his way up through the ranks in the Sûreté. It was Gamache’s first day on the job in the shared position of Chief Inspector of homicide. In the midst of this community tragedy, Agent Lysette Cloutier, announced to her superior officers, Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir that the daughter of her friend was missing.

With a mix of rain, snow, and ice continuing to fall, the spring thaw threatened to send a 100-year-flood to threaten small towns and big cities alike as rivers overflowed their banks and dams threatened to burst. When Gamache and his team of investigators finally looked beyond their perception of Tracey, they realized that the truth was more terrible than anything they could have imagined. Gamache and others assumed that Carl Tracey, the alcoholic and abusive husband of Vivienne Godin, was responsible for her death. In the novel A Better Man by Louise Penny, the fifteenth installment in the Chief Inspector Gamache series, Armand Gamache learns that even after all of his experience investigating crimes and trying to make unprejudiced decisions, he still falls prey to his own human nature. The following version of the novel was used to create this study guide: Penny, Louise.