A Fatal Grace: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel: 2

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Gamache treats her with some basic human decency -- putting a coat around her when she's cold, encouraging her to eat despite her mother's death -- and the book treats this as behaviour that's so saintly it bewilders onlookers, who can't understand how anyone could bother to put a coat on a cold child's shoulders. Having done so, I can stand back and dispassionately appreciate Penny's accomplishment; my problem is that this just isn't the sort of book that appeals to me. I’m not going to discuss the plot, other than to say that the unpleasant woman who was murdered was mourned by nobody, and her impending doom is mentioned in the first sentence.

Come sempre il villaggio di Three Pines e i suoi abitanti sono al centro della narrazione e aiutano Gamache a risolvere il mistero. Watching her caress her book with more tenderness than she'd ever shown when caressing him, he wondered whether her ice water insides had somehow seeped into him, perhaps during sex, and were slowly freezing him. Louise Penny has become a firm favorite in the murder mystery genre and I just loved to be home in the Three Pines village of Quebec again with all the characters welcoming me. Within minutes Gamache and his second-in-command, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, are on their way to Three Pines, to investigate the very odd death of CC de Poitiers. 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.Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté and his wife, Reine-Marie, make their first appearance in the book on the day after Christmas, when they have a tradition of reviewing unsolved cases.

I loved the way your wrote about the Hadley House, as though it were a young boy in short pants shuffling its feet and saying, “It wasn’t me that did it! Louise Penny allows a glimpse of the inner workings of several characters a bit more, and I found this refreshing.Myrna looked out the window and wondered whether their peace, so fragile and precious, was about to be shattered.

From the Dagger award winning author Louise Penny comes the second Armand Gamache mystery set in the stunning countryside of Quebec. I was surprised and delighted to find myself back in the village of Three Pines for the second Gamache mystery. I remember how thrilling it was when she did win—but what I had forgotten, until Louise mentioned it recently, was that the awards banquet happened to fall on my birthday. It’s been some time, but I was happy to find myself back in Three Pines, the idyllic little community in Quebec that is peppered with interesting characters, as well as several secrets. Although there were the trademark astute one-liners such as: It was almost impossible to electrocute someone these days, unless you were the governor of Texas, it was hard to feel sympathetic to some characters because I had read ahead.

Here it’s the kind of weather when you find yourself stripped down to barely acceptable clothing and opening the fridge or freezer a little more often than necessary. This patchwork quilt of personalities keeps the story from getting too dreary, though Penny does offer much in the way of backstory and character development, such that I am going to have to keep things straight to learn all their nuances.