A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny
There’s 12 days of Christmas, folks. We all have through January 6th to celebrate. So I got my holiday reading in just under the wire. Yay me. Been meaning to return to the Inspector Gamache series after enjoying the first book. The women from my crime fiction class swear to it and I can see why. It’s an engaging mystery series that has the elements of a cozy but is a little more hardened. Three Pines is a charming place and the people all seem […]
A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny
It’s always interesting to see where the second book of a new detective series is going to take us. The Tana French novels upend the first book by essentially retiring the previous detective and handing the series off like a baton. In others like Poirot, it’s more episodic with the detective embarking just another case. And in others still, it’s the next day practically like the Tess Monaghan books more or less do. Here it’s a little of both, at least so far, with Armand […]
While this novel was still good, I was not quite as enamored with this one as with Still Life. I think it took too long to get to the murder. The novel introduces Cecilia “CC” de Poitiers on the first page, and states within the first paragraph that she would be the murder victim, but Penny spent quite a while with CC and her other characters before actually getting around to killing CC. I was anxiously awaiting her death because she was horrible, and I […]
I still really like this series, but I was a bit more lukewarm over this book than I wanted to be. Let’s split it up into good and not-so-good. First, good: The mystery in this one was interesting. CC de Poitiers is a wannabe lifestyle guru who has recently moved to Three Pines with her husband and child, whom she disliked and ignored. Her relationship with Crie, her overweight fourteen year old daughter, is downright emotionally abusive. She is seen as cruel by everybody who […]
What struck me most as I read A Fatal Grace was the compassion of Inspector Armand Gemache. I have only read two of the Inspector Gemache books, but I suspect that Louise Penny puts great value on people who see. People who see more than the surface. Gemache can see into people, and find compassion for them. Clara sees and creates art. Ruth sees and writes poetry. ‘People expect me to be cynical because of my job,’ Gamache found himself saying, ‘but they don’t understand. It’s […]
CBR8 Reviews 5-7 I binged through the first three books in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series in about a week’s time. Unlike my previous three book binge, this one was out of sheer pleasure. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is the head of the Surêté du Québec and he and his team are assigned to look into a suspicious death in a small town outside of Montreal called Three Pines. In Three Pines, we meet a cast of characters and most of the first book […]
