These books / novels / mysteries just get better and better as the years and the series goes on. We don’t learn much about the writer of the Chief Inspector Gamache series, Louise Penny. She is Canadian, as is he, she lives in a small village south of Montreal, the same region, the Eastern Townships, where Three Pines is located, down near the Vermont / US border. Which is fine with me.
It is her brain that is amazing, in building the atmosphere, the strong and interesting characters, the life of the village, the multiple puzzles – one usually the actual murder(s), the village and its life, and the other of the life of the Surete team headed by Gamache. I just listened to her voice, on her eponymous website, pronouncing the names of the main characters. And was delighted to learn that I had been pronouncing almost all of them correctly. Except for forgetting that Guy becomes Gee in Quebec.
This book is about the death of the Hermit. Intricate and yet easily followed, thanks to Louise’s excellent writing and apt way of breaking the action into sections, easily keeping us all on the same page with her agile mind and plot.
These are stories and lives that make sense – there is reason even in the motive(s) of the murderer, as Gamache (ga – mash) tells us. Clara and Peter, Myrna, Ruth, Gabri, Olivier – all in Three Pines – are folk you know, who are worth knowing. This is literature and mystery all in one. Aaaaahhhhhh.