Alfred Molina as Chief Inspector Armand Gamache in Three Pines
(Picture: Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video)Three Pines opens with a protest: a young woman of Indigenous heritage, Blue Two-Rivers, has been missing for a year, and her family feel like the Eastern Township police have neglected her case. It’s one of many, they say as they chant and cry – the Indigenous community feels utterly abandoned. When one of the protesters gets roughed up by an officer, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, played by Alfred Molina, rushes out of the station to break up the struggle and drives the woman home.
It’s an intriguing start: who is this gentle inspector and what has happened to Blue Two-Rivers? The mystery is set in a fictional town, Three Pines, in Québec’s Eastern Townships (which are located at the bottom of the province); a location where the political and social ramifications of hundreds of years of French and English colonial rule are very much still reverberating.
