If it’s September, it must be time for Louise Penny’s yearly addition to the chronicles of Armand Gamache, always a highly anticipated treat. I am happy to say that this year’s offering renewed my faith in her continued skill to deliver a nuanced, perplexing, utterly enjoyable mystery. (I wasn’t so happy with last year’s book.)

All the Devils Are Here disrupts tradition by setting the entire story in France, rather than centering it in the mysterious town of Three Pines (outside of Montreal) where the Gamaches currently live. Armand and Reine-Marie have traveled to Paris to be in at the birth of their daughter Annie’s and son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir’s second child. The Gamaches’ son, Daniel, and his wife and two daughters have lived in Paris for some time, but the Beauvoirs have only recently moved there, after Jean-Guy chose to leave the Sûreté du Québec for the private sector, an engineering firm in Paris, so this trip reunites everyone in the family.

Paris is also a home to Armand’s beloved godfather, Stephen Horowitz, who raised Armand from about age nine. Although his godfather remains hale and hearty, the man is 93 years old, so there may not be many more encounters in their future, and the occasion of the birth of Armand’s granddaughter is a particularly joyful one to share with Stephen, who serves in the capacity of great-grandfather.

Horowitz is a billionaire with diverse interests, and it becomes apparent to Armand that he is in Paris for more than just the birth. His cryptic statement (taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) that “Hell is empty and all the devils are here” reverberates in Armand’s mind throughout this trip. Stephen’s specialty in business has always been to root out corruption and bad dealings within and amongst companies and to reveal or thwart them somehow before they can do more harm but, contrary to his usual practice with Armand, he is silent about whatever issue is pending.

After a dinner en famille at their favorite restaurant, Armand and Reine-Marie watch in horror as a van barrels towards and runs down Stephen, who is crossing the street while looking at his telephone and pauses at the sight of the Eiffel Tower lighting up for the evening. But this was no accident; the hit-and-run was deliberate, and starts the story rolling as the family begins to ponder who would want to harm or kill Stephen and why. It soon becomes apparent that the Paris police, possibly at the very highest levels, are involved/not to be trusted, and Armand, his wife, and his two sons are soon playing a game of cat and mouse, hoping to avoid bad consequences while ferreting out the mystery Horowitz (now in a coma from which he is not expected to recover) has left behind for them to handle.

Paris is not a city about which I can be objective. It enthralls me whenever I am there, whether that’s literally (only twice and that briefly) or within the pages of a book. Penny makes the city one of the chief characters in the novel, especially as she weaves the histories of Horowitz and the various Gamache family members into its environs—Stephen’s presence in the Resistance, Armand’s marriage proposal to Reine-Marie, their current wanderings amongst its landmarks and personal favorite haunts. I thought, as so many others have said, that I would miss the critical element of Three Pines in this book, but I actually think it was brilliant to extract all of the characters from their regular venue—it made the story much more about their interactions and relationships when not constrained by the familiarity of background, especially set against the magnificence of Paris.

Armand’s family is front and center in this book, and we get to know some previously less prominent characters much better, including Reine-Marie and especially Daniel. There has been an estrangement between Armand and his son since Daniel’s adolescence, and this relationship is finally put under the microscope as the two men have to deal with the reality of mutual dependence to save them all from disaster. The scenes between them are among the most emotionally charged we have seen in this series, and that is saying something, considering Penny doesn’t shy away from interpersonal angst or joy.

The mystery, murder, and mayhem are likewise intricate, puzzling, exciting, and ultimately satisfying, involving as they do the past and present of all the characters and drawing in the movers and shakers of society and business and their contracted mercenaries. Penny really makes the reader stay on his or her toes along with the principals in her novels, in order to understand and solve this kind of puzzle.

I would like to say that I do still feel Penny has changed her narrative writing style for the worse, using as she does so many strung-together incomplete sentences punctuated by periods where there should be commas and semicolons: “The cracked and faded picture showed a young woman. Smiling. But her eyes were grave. And beside her was a young man. Arm across her shoulder.”

But…with a triumph this big under her belt, I’m not going to quibble overmuch. I can think of only one or two other entries in this series that I found so compelling. After my comparative disappointment with last year’s book, to say I am relieved is a big understatement.