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PrintBathtub Reading: Louise Penny Mysteries
Run, don’t walk, to the bookstore to buy these three fantastic, delightful, engrossing mysteries by Canadian author Louise Penny. These are old-fashioned, Agatha Christie-type whodunits featuring Armand Gamache, a modern-day (and much more likeable) version of Christie’s Hercule Poirot. The stories are set in a small town in Quebec and include a cast of characters so real and well developed that you really begin to care about them. Case in point: After reading these three, I went back to the bookstore and bought all of this author’s works and panicked when I read the back of one of her later novels, discovering that a popular character was arrested for murder. Oh no! It can’t be true! I can’t wait to read it to find out. One word to the wise: Read these books in order. Things happen in the second and third books that she has set up in the first, and it pays to know the backstory.
Still Life
Louise Penny
2008, St. Martin’s Griffin
In Penny’s first novel, we meet Armand Gamache, Quebec’s gallant and courtly chief homicide inspector, when he and his team are summoned to the quaint village of Three Pines to investigate a suspicious death. The town’s beloved retired schoolteacher is found dead, the victim of an apparent hunting accident. But soon Gamache and his team find that everything is not as it seems in idyllic Three Pines, and what fi rst looked like a terrible accident is actually murder. As he looks deeper into the situation, we meet the people of Three Pines, characters so real and delightful that you’ll want to move there… if not for the town’s penchant for people winding up dead, of course.
A Fatal Grace
Louise Penny
2011, Minotaur
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns to Three Pines in this follow-up to Still Life, when a universally disliked woman in the town is electrocuted at a Christmas curling competition. Everyone, it seems, had an axe to grind with this lady, so Gamache’s list of suspects is very long indeed. Meanwhile, investigating another murder in Montreal, he finds what might just be a Three Pines connection. As if all of this wasn’t enough for Gamache to handle during the holiday season, he begins to suspect that a rookie cop who he all but fired in Still Life is back. Is she spying on him for others in the department?
The Cruelest Month
Louise Penny
2011, Minotaur
This is my favorite of these three books, perhaps because a rather otherworldly element sneaks into this traditional mystery. During a séance in a haunted house with a psychic visiting Three Pines, one of the townspeople drops dead. Gamache returns to Three Pines to investigate, and finds that the victim, a woman everyone adored, was actually murdered. Who could have possibly done it? Meanwhile, we learn more about Gamache’s difficulties within his own department — he brought down a popular police chief after discovering he was murderously corrupt, and is now feeling the backlash from those in the department still loyal to this chief. Will his career survive?
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