The Nature of Things

The latest in Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series takes the inspector and his wife out of their little Quebec village of Three Pines and on to Paris. They have gone there to be with their daughter Annie who is about to give birth to their granddaughter. Both of the Gamache's children and their families live in Paris now and Annie's husband Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache's former second in command, has left police work and is employed in the private sector. Also in Paris is Gamache's elderly godfather, billionaire Stephen Horowitz. So, it is family reunion time in Gay Paree. The happy times come to a brutal end when Horowitz is run down by a van while crossing the street. The driver then speeds away. It was all witnessed by Gamache who is sure the "accident" was no accident. Horowitz survives, just barely, and is taken to the hospital in critical condition. When the Paris police seem skeptical that the hit and run was a deliberate attempt on Horowitz's ...

This is the fifteenth in Louise Penny's Three Pines Armand Gamache mystery series. She produces a new one, regular as clockwork, every summer. Her multitude of fans, among whom I count myself, await them impatiently.  The bane of long series like this one is that their plots tend to become formulaic and predictable. Somehow Penny has avoided this. Each new entry seems to break new ground and deal with the current state of the world. In A Better Man,  she explores as she has not before the deep physical and psychological damage that domestic violence does in long-term effects on the personalities of victims. And she examines the damage that the unbridled hate expressed through social media does to the fabric of society.  Moreover, it is not just the human on human violence, both physical and psychological, that play an important role in this plot; the violence of Nature is the backdrop of it all. It is April, "the cruelest month", and Quebec is experiencing catastrophic fl...

This is the fourteenth in Louise Penny's popular Armand Gamache detective series. Gamache has long been a favorite of mine. He is a complicated and well-developed character, a humane and philosophical policeman who always has his eye on the bigger picture of how the work that he does affects society as a whole. Moreover, he and his beloved Reine-Marie are now living in that quirky little Canadian village that time and the mapmakers forgot, Three Pines, with all of its eccentric inhabitants. Spending time with them is like sliding into a warm bubblebath on a cold winter night. You can see then why I always look forward to these visits with Gamache and his coterie.  This time around, Gamache is still on suspension from his position as head of the  Sûreté du Québec as a consequence of the action in the last book, Glass Houses . His son-in-law and protege, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, is now acting head while the investigation of that action continues. The fallout from the action and the in...

Louise Penny's latest book featuring Armand Gamache,  now Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec, is a meditation on the role of the conscience in human affairs, as, in fact, all of her books are. It seems only incidental that there is a murder to solve. Gamache's team from the  Sûreté  is intact, as are his friends and supporters in the little anonymous village of Three Pines where he and his wife Reine-Marie had moved after his initial "retirement" from the  Sûreté. Of course, that retirement didn't take. Now, Gamache must face the fact that his team is losing - or has already lost - perhaps its toughest battle: the war on drugs. Drugs pass almost freely through the province of  Québec on their way south to the huge market in the United States.  The porous border between the province and Vermont, much of it heavily forested, makes it almost impossible for the police to interdict the traffic.  People are dying in great numbers on both sides of t...

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny My rating: 4 of 5 stars Reading one of Louise Penny's Armand Gamache mysteries is like receiving a warm embrace from a much-loved old friend. It is comfort reading of the highest order. A Great Reckoning is the twelfth entry in the series. I've read them all - in order, of course. There are none of them that I haven't enjoyed, though some naturally are better than others, but this, in my opinion, is one of the best. Armand Gamache spent years as the head of homicide in the Sûreté du Québec, and during that time, he discovered that his agency was riddled with corruption. The venality of a powerful cadre within the Sûreté had created an atmosphere of cruelty and criminality that had cost it the trust and respect of the public. Gamache made it his crusade to clean up the agency and once again make it worthy of public trust. He accomplished his goal, but it almost cost him his life. He retired from the Sûreté and he and his wife went to live ...

The Nature of the Beast by Louise Penny My rating: 4 of 5 stars When nine-year-old Laurent Lepage bursts into the bistro in the sleepy little village of Three Pines on a beautiful mid-September afternoon excitedly telling the patrons there about a huge gun, bigger than a house, that he found in the woods, his listeners smile and shrug it off, assuming that it is just another of Laurent's tall tales. For Laurent is a small boy with an outsized imagination full of aliens and monsters, and when he says that his huge gun has a monster on it, that confirms things for the villagers: Just another of Laurent's tales. Laurent begs his friend Armand Gamache, the now retired Chief Inspector from the Sûreté, to come and look at the gun, Gamache instead loads the boy and his bicycle into his car and drives him home. But one person present in the bistro that day to hear Laurent's story knew that he could actually be telling the literal truth. That person would do anything to ensure that...

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny My rating: 4 of 5 stars Throughout this wonderful series featuring the humane and incorruptible Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, one of the recurring themes has been how art is made and how the lives of the artists affect their art. This theme has been explored most closely through the stories of the residents of the little village of Three Pines in Quebec, where many of Gamache's cases have taken him over the years. Long-time readers of the series, like myself, tend to think of those residents as old and treasured friends for, through his long association with them, that is what they have become for Gamache. The Chief Inspector's recent cases, in addition to murder investigations, have been a battle against a dark corruption eating away at his beloved police force from within. The last book, How the Light Gets In detailed the climax of that battle, an effort which almost killed Gamache and tested the strength of his relationship with his belo...

My rating: 4 of 5 stars When we last spent time with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, he had just solved The Beautiful Mystery at a remote monastery in Québec. He solved the mystery in spite of interference and obstructionism from his implacable enemy - and boss - Superintendent Sylvain Francoeur. He solved the mystery but he lost his long-time second-in-command and the man he loves as a son, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Francoeur had seduced Beauvoir by playing on his physical and psychological pain from an old wound and getting him hooked on prescription drugs, namely Oxycontin. In his mental state, Beauvoir turned against Gamache and Francoeur had transferred him into his own unit and supervision where he could better control him and ensure his downward spiral into the depths of addiction. As How the Light Gets In opens, Francoeur's sabotage of Gamache has gone even further. He has broken up Gamache's homicide division and all of his carefully trained officers...

The monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups is hidden deep in the wilderness of Quebec. It is home to two dozen cloistered monks who live lives of contemplation and prayer, locked away from the world. They tend their gardens and their chickens and make chocolate-covered blueberries for sale or exchange with other monasteries and they sing. They sing plainchant, Gregorian chants. This music over the centuries has become known as the "beautiful mystery" because of its profound and almost magical effect on both singer and listener. Even though the community of Saint Gilbert have taken a vow of silence, they raise their voices in these chants and a recording of them singing has been sent out into the world where it became a sensation. People love the music. Unfortunately, within the community the recording causes sensation also. And dissension. The community divides along the lines of those who want to make more recordings to raise money to support the repairs that need to be ...

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team from the Sûreté du Québec have survived (at least most of them) a terrible shootout with terrorists at a warehouse in Quebec, but they did not survive unscathed.  Gamache and his second in command Jean Guy Beauvoir still suffer from their wounds and from the effects of post traumatic stress. But life goes on. The job goes on. Murderers still have to be found and put away. Gamache and his team are once again called to the idyllic hidden village of Three Pines where murder seems to be a cottage industry. This time, an outsider has been murdered. She was an artist and former art critic and childhood friend of local artist Clara Morrow.  However, their friendship had ended in acrimony long ago and now, inexplicably, the victim had turned up at a time of celebration for Clara. She had had her one-woman art show at the famed Musée in Montreal and she and her friends had returned to Three Pines to celebrate the show with a party. Sometime d...

One of the pleasures of the Armand Gamache series - and there are many - is the description of the food. Wherever his job as head of the homicide division of the Surete du Quebec takes him, Gamache always seems to eat exceedingly well, and Louise Penny describes it all in intricate detail - the herbs used, the consistency of the sauce, and especially the aroma of the baking bread and of the coffee, always the coffee. That is never more true than in this fourth entry in the series. Armand and his beloved Reine-Marie have gone to the Manoir Bellechasse for a short vacation and to fulfill their tradition of celebrating their anniversary at this inn which holds so much nostalgia for them. It's their thirty-fifth anniversary and they are enjoying their time away from it all, being cosseted and pampered by the staff of the Manoir. The Gamaches are not the only guests. The Morrow/Finney family has arrived for their family reunion and a more obnoxious and unattractive family is hard to ima...

When reading a mystery series, I think it is a mistake to read the books out of sequence. But earlier this year my Mystery Book Club read Bury Your Dead , the sixth in Louise Penny's Armand Gamache series, and it was my introduction to this series. After finishing that book and loving it, I determined to read the series in order and I've been working my way through the books here at the end of the year.  Then I picked up The Brutal Telling , number five in the series, and made another mistake. I was reading the book on my Kindle and thought I had started number four. By the time I had realized my mistake, I was already involved in the story.  Now, I have to circle back and read number four.   Sigh . But having read Bury Your Dead earlier proved really problematic for reading this book because the final solution to this book's mystery is revealed there. And so, I read this book knowing all along who the murderer was. I knew so much more than the investigators and I kept h...

Louise Penny's mysteries are very much in the tradition of Agatha Christie. Her Chief Inspector Gamache is almost a cross between Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple! He combines the brilliance of Poirot with the small village values of Miss Marple. He is unfailingly courteous to all, even to the murder suspects that he and his team investigate in their roles with the Homicide Division of the Surete du Quebec.  He has a soft spot for outsiders, for those whose value may not be recognized by others in the Surete or in society. Frequently, he makes them a part of his investigative team and his team has an almost 100% rate of solving crimes, thus proving Gamache's instincts are golden.  His inclusion of these outsiders always meets resistance from his second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvoir, even though Jean Guy himself was once one of Gamache's "outsider projects." That could be said of most members of this highly successful investigative team. Once again that team is calle...

This was the perfect time to read this book. The action takes place around Christmas in Three Pines, the idyllic village in the mountains of Quebec.   It is a village where everything seems postcard perfect. As the snow falls, it could certainly serve as the scene on the front of a holiday card. There's only one tiny flaw in this otherwise perfect scene: The murder rate here seems astronomical! Part of the traditional Christmas celebration in Three Pines is the annual curling tournament that takes place on a nearby frozen lake. The whole village, including CC Poitiers and her mouse of a husband and her pathetic daughter, have turned out for the exhibition. Also present is CC's photographer (and lover) who has been hired to take pictures of her interacting with the locals for a project the would-be Martha Stewart clone is planning.  In the middle of the action, in the middle of the lake, in front of the whole village, CC is electrocuted. But no one will admit to having seen any...

Earlier this year, the leader of my local Mystery Book Club introduced me to the work of Louise Penny. As our book club selection for that month, we read  Bury Your Dead . Wonderful book! I knew that I had to get to know that humane policeman, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec better. At my earliest opportunity, I would go back and start reading this award-winning series from the beginning. Well, my opportunity came this week when I picked up the first book in the series,   Still Life ,  to read. Immediately, I was propelled once again back into the idyllic village of Three Pines. The peace of the village had been shattered by the death of one its well-loved residents, Jane Neal. Her body was found in the woods on a Sunday morning. She had been pierced by an arrow straight through her heart. It was bow hunting season in the area and the villagers were convinced that Jane had been killed by accident by some careless bow hunter. But when Chief Inspector...