The discovery of a dead body in the woods on Thanksgiving Weekend brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues to a place called Three Pines. Gamache cannot understand why anyone would want to deliberately kill well-loved artist Jane Neal, especially any of the residents of the village - a place so free from crime it doesn't even have its own police force.

But Gamache knows that evil is lurking somewhere behind the white picket fences and that, if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will start to give up its dark secrets.