CC has been murdered. Gamache and his second in command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, arrive in Three Pines to investigate. Accompanied by a local police officer named Robert Lemieux, they examine the crime scene. The method of the murder puzzles them. CC was standing behind an aluminum lawn chair on a frozen lake watching the local curling tournament when she collapsed. Her death was assumed to be a heart attack until the examining physician at the hospital found burn marks on her hands and feet indicating electrocution.

This would have been an outlandish way to commit a murder: “Someone had been insane enough to try. Someone had been brilliant enough to succeed” (83).

The investigators have no idea how a woman could be electrocuted while standing on a sheet of ice. A 15-foot heating element dome stood behind CC’s lawn chair, but there was no obvious contact point between the electricity and her chair.

Gamache thinks, “Just hours ago this place had been full of happy people. Except one. One had been so unhappy, so wretched and dis-eased, he’d had to take a life” (83). When Gamache confides that he wants to bring Lemieux into the investigation, Beauvoir objects.