It all begins with a nine-year-old boy, Laurent Lepage, who was prone to making up wild stories, entering the bistro of Three Pines and announcing that he had found a large gun--bigger than anything you could imagine--that had a monster on it. He wanted former Chief Inspector Armand Gamache to come and look at it. Instead, he takes him home to his parents. Not long after that the boy is dead in a bicycle accident that Gamache figures out is murder because of how the body is situated and because the stick that the boy's father gave him as a birthday present that he is never without was not found at the scene, meaning that it was left where his body was killed.
A search is conducted in the woods where the boy played to find the stick, but instead of finding the stick a false opening is found to a cavern that Gamache and Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir enter to find the boy's stick on the floor but also what appears to be a missile launcher of some sort hanging from the ceiling with a seven-headed monster being ridden by a wild woman etched on the side.
Chief Inspector Isabelle Lacoste is brought in and she calls a General from the military and shows him pictures hoping he can help her with this problem but he has no one who can help with this missile that is analog, meaning it has no electrical components. It doesn't even need a battery to charge it. Beauvoir contacts a retired physics professor who worked on trajectory systems. Professor Rosenblatt who confirms what the gun actually is and who made it.
Dr. Gerald Bull in the eighties began building the Babylon Project, a missile launcher that could launch any missile including a nuclear one from anywhere without a power source. He was planning on selling it to Saddam Hussein but was assassinated supposedly by Mossad in Brussels in 1990 in order to keep him from finishing the project. But there were rumors that he had completed it and the plans were out there somewhere. On the side of the gun are the words in Hebrew "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept". The woman on the gun is supposed to be the Whore of Babylon bringing about the Apocolypse. This gun would be able to wipe out an entire city, or a spy satellite, so in a way this was true.
Two CSIS intelligence agents show up and Lacoste believes that the General must have sent them. They know way more than they're telling about the gun and what their agenda is, though part of that seems to be to get ahold of the plans of the gun and the firing pin that is also missing. They appear to be two bumbling file clerks who have never done field work, but appearance can be deceiving.
The other storyline going on in this book the local theater group led by Antoinette Lemaitre and her partner Brian Fitzpatrick. The play is called She Sat Down and Wept and it's a comedy that they soon find out is written by John Flemming, Canada's most famous serial killer. Gamache, in particular, wants to shut down the play because the public trial wasn't the only trial held for him. In Canada, they can hold a trial within a trial for acts to brutal for the public to hear and require one person to be present to hear the trial to represent all of Canada and Gamache was chosen as that person. He heard some truly horrible things at that trial.
Gamache also sees a connection between Fleming and the gun based on the title of the play. But everyone tells him he is crazy. Then Antoinette is found murdered in her home that has been searched through. What were they looking for and is the same person who killed Laurent the same person who killed Antoinette? I couldn't flip through the pages fast enough in this book that really held me in its grip. It was a truly fascinating read made even more so when you realize there really was a Dr. Gerald Bull and a Project Babylon. This novel won the 2016 Lefty Award for Best World Mystery and was a finalist for the Agatha and Anthony Awards. I give this book a solid five out of five stars. You won't regret reading this book.
More Information about Dr. Gerald Bull and Project Babylon: https://fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/other/supergun.htm
Link to Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Beast-Chief-Inspector-Gamache-ebook/dp/B00SSBZ51M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539779237&sr=8-1&keywords=the+nature+of+the+beast+by+louise+penny
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