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The deadliest little village in the Eastern Townships

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

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The Cruelest Month is the third installment in the Inspector Gamanche detective novel series. Like the prior two novels, The Cruelest Month is also set in the Stars Hollow-esque Eastern Township village of Three Pines. Gamanche is called in after one of the village inhabitants, Madeleine Favreau, drops dead in the middle of a séance that a group of villagers were holding in the old Hadley house up on the hill. Although Madeleine had a bad heart, someone slipped her a dose of ephedrine to […]

Crime Spree

Skin Deep by Sung J. Woo

The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth and the Case of Two Missing Girls by Jax Miller

Later by Stephen King

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I binged a lot of crime fiction (with one non-fictional exception) as there was a lot of traffic on my already long commute this week, allowing me to synergize eyeball reading with audio. Plus I took off the weekend so I had some extra time… Skin Deep 3 stars So rare, entertaining and enjoyable to have a transracial adoptee as a protagonist. While author Sung J. Woo doesn’t lean too hard on Siobhan’s background, he weaves it in to make her a fully realized person. The […]

Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper.

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

The Last Colony by John Scalzi

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque

My Mum is a Twat by Anoushka Warden

Bella Bella by Harvey Fierstein

Intimations by Zadie Smith

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton

Leviathan by Paul Auster

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Light of Day by Eric Ambler

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Humiliated and Insulted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Rumble Fish by SE Hinton

Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani

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The Cruelest Month – 3/5 Stars This is the third Louise Penny “Inspector Gamache” detective novel, and I think it’s a decided dip in quality from an overarching look at it. The mystery itself, quaint, small town, punctuated with poetry and art and other little considerations is perfectly interesting. At a seance, from a combination of fright and maybe poisoning, a woman is found dead. There must be an elaborate set of circumstances to come to pass to have her die, but if they were […]

The Real Mystery is the Economy of Three Pines

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

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I didn’t finish this one in time for Canada Day but at least the call for Canada Day reviews provided the push for me to finally read this one.  It’s weird because I loved the first Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novel but haven’t felt the need to plow through it in the way that I basically binged through the Sebastian St. Cyr series.  I certainly had trepidations coming into this one because narfna’s review highlighted issues that were already showing signs of developing (for me […]

“It’s our secrets that make us sick.”

The Cruelest Month (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #3) by Louise Penny

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This book bored and frustrated me for the first third, and then something turned and the plot and interesting character stuff got going, and my annoyances were subsumed under actual interest for the characters and story. Subsumed is a fun word to use by the way. Do they still sell Word of the Day toilet paper? I heard about that one time but never investigated further. So when I say that I was frustrated, I mean that I seriously contemplated not continuing with the series. […]

Corruption And Poison

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

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This was an hard book to read. In keeping with the title, cruelty was on display in ways large and small. All murder mysteries contain the cruelty of murder, but this one also had the cruelties that we committ on the people we love most and the self-inflicted damage we do to ourselves. I almost quit this book. I posted in the Facebook group about the anxiety I was feeling about Gamache being set up, but it was a moment between two other characters that […]



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