When a peaceful monastery in Québec is shattered by the murder of their renowned choir director, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir of the Sãurete du Québec are challenged to find the killer in a cloistered community that has taken avow of silence.

Inside a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, off the South Carolina coast, is a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. It is to Egret Island that Jessie Sullivan, a woman whose life has been constrained by circumstances, to care for her mother, who hasn't yet recovered from Jessie's father's death 33 years before. As Jessie contemplates the separation...

"In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks--young Trian and old Cormac--he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean?"--

After painstakingly handcrafting a replacement copy of a library book, a medieval monk tries to protect it from a hungry bear with a taste for literature. Includes historical note on illuminated manuscripts.