Louise Penny and Inspector Gamache
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50 free Louise Penny and Inspector Gamache trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels have sold in the millions by doing something unusual for crime fiction: they care as much about kindness as about the killing. Each book brings the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec back to Three Pines, a village too small to appear in any atlas, where the bistro is warm, the neighbours are eccentric and the body count is alarming. This quiz covers the whole world of the series. There are questions on the villagers and the detectives, on how the victims die and where each case takes Gamache, on the titles and the poems and songs behind them, and on the film and television versions. A few look at Penny herself: her first career, the people and places that shaped the books, and the meaning of the letters F.I.N.E. that readers ask about so often. It suits book clubs working through the series, readers who have just finished a Gamache novel, and anyone who wants to test how closely they have been paying attention in Three Pines. Every answer comes with a short explanation that adds something the question left out.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which actor, Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2, played Armand Gamache in the 2022 television series Three Pines?
Alfred Molina
Alfred Molina was also an executive producer of Three Pines, which told four two-part mysteries before it was cancelled after a single season.
Q 02Which former US secretary of state co-wrote the 2021 political thriller State of Terror with Louise Penny?
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton and Penny made their heroine a secretary of state too, and Armand Gamache turns up in a minor role.
Q 03Rosa, the constant companion of the elderly poet in Louise Penny's Three Pines, is which kind of animal?
A duck
A duck, Rosa hatched under the poet's care in The Cruelest Month, and fans love her for seeming to share her owner's taste for swearing.
Q 04In Louise Penny's A Fatal Grace, CC de Poitiers is electrocuted while watching which sport on a frozen lake?
Curling
Curling brings the whole village to the lake on Boxing Day, so the murder happens in front of a crowd, yet nobody sees how it was done.
Q 05Louise Penny says kind, courteous Armand Gamache was inspired by which person in her own life, a Montreal doctor?
Her husband
Her husband, Michael Whitehead, headed hematology at Montreal Children's Hospital; they met on a blind date, and he urged her to quit journalism and write.
Q 06In Louise Penny's Still Life, retired schoolteacher Jane Neal is found dead in the woods, killed by which weapon?
An arrow
An arrow through the heart could be a hunting accident, so Gamache first has to prove that anyone meant to kill the well-loved old teacher.
Q 07All the Devils Are Here takes Armand Gamache to which city, where his godfather Stephen Horowitz is run down?
Paris
Paris sends Gamache from the top of the Eiffel Tower to the depths of the city archives after a strange key turns up among the old man's things.
Q 08A Fatal Grace won Louise Penny the first of her many awards named after which Golden Age crime novelist?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie gives her name to the Agatha Awards for traditional mysteries, and Penny won Best Novel four years running from 2007.
Q 09Which Three Pines villager published the poetry collection I'm FINE, whose title hides a far ruder acronym?
Ruth Zardo
Ruth Zardo wins the Governor General's Award for her verse, and Penny took the title from a wry saying she heard in her 12-step programme.
Q 10In Louise Penny's novels, three pines on the village green signalled safety to which arriving refugees?
Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution
Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution knew a cluster of three pines meant friends, a story Penny heard from a stranger at a church-basement supper.
Q 11What is the first name of Armand Gamache's wife, who rose to be chief archivist at Quebec's national library?
Reine-Marie
Reine-Marie is as curious as the detective she married, and in The Nature of the Beast she uses her library credentials to dig up research the police need.
Q 12Which officer, for years Armand Gamache's second-in-command, becomes his son-in-law by marrying his daughter Annie?
Jean-Guy Beauvoir
Jean-Guy Beauvoir marries Annie Gamache in Three Pines at the end of How the Light Gets In, after a stint in rehab for his addiction to painkillers.
Q 13Myrna Landers gave up her Montreal psychology practice to run which kind of business in Three Pines?
A bookstore
Q 21In The Beautiful Mystery, monks under a vow of silence are world-famous for singing which kind of music?
Gregorian chant
Gregorian chant gives the novel its title, a name for the music's effect on singer and listener, and it has made a hidden abbey of two dozen monks famous far beyond Quebec.
Q 22The title How the Light Gets In comes from Anthem, a song by which Canadian singer-songwriter and poet?
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen spent ten years writing Anthem, released on his 1992 album The Future, and Penny thanks him in the book's acknowledgements.
Q 23The Ouellet sisters in How the Light Gets In, once Canada's most famous children, were modelled on which real siblings?
The Dionne quintuplets
A bookstore for new and used titles stands next to the bistro, and in The Cruelest Month Gamache retreats there to talk a case through with Myrna.
Q 14Which Three Pines painter's first solo show, at Montreal's Musée d'art contemporain, opens A Trick of the Light?
Clara Morrow
Clara Morrow has spent years in the shadow of Peter, the better-known painter she married, and her triumph sours when a body turns up in her garden.
Q 15Which Three Pines bistro owner is arrested for murdering a hermit in The Brutal Telling, then cleared a book later?
Olivier Brulé
Olivier Brulé had hidden his visits to the hermit's treasure-filled cabin, and in Bury Your Dead his partner's daily letters push Gamache to reopen the case.
Q 16Henri, the dog who walks the Plains of Abraham with Armand Gamache in Bury Your Dead, is which breed?
German shepherd
German shepherd Henri is a fixture of the series, and a Quebec City walking tour follows the route he and Gamache take across the old battlefield.
Q 17Louise Penny's Still Life opens when a body is found near Three Pines on which Canadian holiday weekend?
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving falls in October in Quebec, so the series begins among autumn leaves; the next three books take winter, Easter and high summer.
Q 18In The Cruelest Month, Madeleine Favreau apparently dies of fright during which gathering at the Old Hadley House?
A séance
A séance held to rid the house of its evil reputation ends with a shriek in the dark, though the dead woman's blood turns out to hold a diet drug.
Q 19In A Rule Against Murder, Julia Martin is crushed by which object at the lakeside Manoir Bellechasse?
A statue
A statue of her late father, unveiled only the day before, topples onto her, yet it leaves no mark on its pedestal to show how it moved.
Q 20In Bury Your Dead, murdered archaeologist Augustin Renaud spent his life hunting the lost grave of which explorer?
Samuel de Champlain
Samuel de Champlain died at Quebec in 1635 and his burial place really is unknown, despite digs across the old city since the 1850s.
The Dionne quintuplets, born in Ontario in 1934, were put on show to tourists as children, and Penny imagines one such sister hiding in old age.
Q 24Armand Gamache admits to which phobia, one his second-in-command balances with a dread of enclosed spaces?
Heights
Heights first trouble him in Still Life, when the trail leads to a hunting blind in the trees and he has to force himself to climb.
Q 25The giant gun hidden in the forest in The Nature of the Beast draws on which real weapons engineer?
Gerald Bull
Gerald Bull designed the Project Babylon supergun for Saddam Hussein's Iraq and was shot dead outside his Brussels apartment in 1990.
Q 26A Great Reckoning begins when which object is found stuffed inside the walls of the Three Pines bistro?
An old map
An old map of the village, drawn like a work of art, becomes a puzzle Gamache sets for four police cadets, and it leads back to the First World War.
Q 27The robed figure standing on the village green in Glass Houses follows a Spanish tradition of shaming people into what?
Paying their debts
Paying their debts is the aim of Spain's cobrador del frac, the dress-coat collector, and Penny imagines an older version that collects on moral debts instead.
Q 28In Kingdom of the Blind, a woman Armand Gamache has never met names him to which role?
Executor of her will
Executor of her will is a job he shares with Myrna and a young builder, and the dead cleaning woman turns out to have called herself the Baroness.
Q 29In A Better Man, the search for missing Vivienne Godin unfolds while which emergency threatens Three Pines?
Spring flooding
Spring flooding has villagers sandbagging the Bella Bella river as the thaw sets in, on Gamache's first case after his demotion to head of homicide.
Q 30The title All the Devils Are Here, a favourite saying of Stephen Horowitz, comes from which Shakespeare play?
The Tempest
The Tempest gives the line to the spirit Ariel, who reports it as the cry of a prince leaping from a ship that seems to be on fire.