A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Gamache)

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A few days later it is Christmas Eve in Three Pines, with shortbread stars (Louise’s books always make me hungry) and carolers and a midnight service at St. I was shocked by Gamache not actually trying to help Crie, but all the characters were shocked that he did. Meanwhile, in “the snow globe that was Three Pines,” CC’s 14-year-old daughter, Crie, has sewn her own chiffon snowflake costume for her school’s Christmas pageant, “to surprise Mommy. Penny uses not only the peaceful Eastern Townships as her setting, but continues to provide the reader with some great character development of Armand Gamache, a man whose intellect is balanced with a compassionate side.

Maybe because he speaks French but Armand Gamache in figuring out clues before his team of detectives reminds me of a modern Hercule Poirot. I have finished up my two go to detective series and have been looking for a long running one for awhile now. I have borrowed the one-liner from Dead Cold “she was only famous in the mirror” (paraphrased) and have used it more than once. Who could have been insane enough to try such a macabre method of murder--or brilliant enough to succeed? In doing so, Penny has attracted a legion of enthusiastic readers who, apparently, can hardly wait for each new installment of the series to appear.And her warmth and human compassion is especially endearing, as is her supercharged inspiration in concocting such an endlessly labyrinthine structure for her book. Also the manner of her death was so contrived and far fetched it made the whole thing almost comical.

I have to ask, am I the only one besides Gamache who can’t understand all of what Billy Williams is saying? Welcome to winter in Three Pines, a picturesque village in Quebec, where the villagers are preparing for a traditional country Christmas, and someone is preparing for murder. He'd begun to suspect this self-absorbed woman had finally finished absorbing herself, her husband and even that disaster of a daughter and was now busy absorbing him. Perhaps this is due in part to the approaching Christmas festivities, but certainly the removal of the town ‘bully’ must have something to do with the cheer.Deliberately electrocuted, the villagers almost seem to be celebrating that the monster is dead and for good reason, but her death is linked to another sad loss nearby.

When Saul turns up at the Bistro on Christmas, Myrna invites him to the community breakfast and curling match on the following day. And the chair is sitting out on the ice with only what, 2 or 3 other chairs around it, and they are all right in front of the shoreline bleachers stuffed with onlookers? On Christmas Eve St Thomas’s was also filled with families, children excited and exhausted, elderly men and women who’d come to this place all their lives and sat in the same pew and worshipped the same God and baptized and married and buried those they loved. Enter Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, a plump middle-aged detective from the Sûreté du Quebec, who initially finds it difficult to work out how CC was murdered when she was surrounded by fellow villagers. I have read the life of Eleanor of Aquitane, and while she was a remarkable woman, she has never rode into any battle, especially not bare-breasted.

Three Pines is a fictional village but the description of it makes you wish it, and it's residents, were real. Even the revelation that she's intelligent, cunning, and desperate enough to have arranged her mother's ingenious murder is shown hand-in-hand with a portrayal of her in a catatonic fantasy not altogether different from CC's own narcissistic delusions.