A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Gamache)

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I decided that “Chairs might red glass” could be “Jars my tired ass,” because Billy Wms went a different way to the hospital than he did with CC in the truck. Each morning he'd wake early and go into the young day, when the world was new and anything was possible, and he'd see how lovely Montreal was. CC’s murder seems impossible: She was electrocuted at the curling match, in the middle of a frozen lake in front of dozens of witnesses.

The beauty of Louise Penny's auspicious debut novel, Still Life , is that it's composed entirely of grace notes, all related to the central mystery of who shot an arrow into the heart of Miss Jane Neal. They'd all said no, immediately recognizing the manuscript as a flaccid mishmash of ridiculous self-help philosophies, wrapped in half-baked Buddhist and Hindu teachings, spewed forth by a woman whose cover photo looked as though she'd eat her young.A Fatal Grace is the second book I've read in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series and I'm ready for the next book. I guessed the murderer early on, but I get the feeling that whodunnit is less important to these books than the local color, the ambience, the sweet community. And I won’t mention the sneaking-around backstabbing that seems to be going on behind our wonderful inspector over some previous case for which he’s in the doghouse. CC is also having an affair with photographer Saul Petrov, not because she is in love with him but because he’s a very good photographer and she wants him to promote her business, and Saul knows she is using him and dislikes her intensely for it. What are the clues to the murders in A Fatal Grace, and how does Louise Penny hide them in plain sight?

Speaking of belief, what do you make of the apparent brushes with God: the beggar who loved Clara’s art (which Em maintains she had never seen); Gamache finding God in a diner eating lemon meringue pie; Em’s road worker with the sign saying “Ice Ahead”; Billy Williams, etc. In the end the text reduces Crie to the symbol of her mother's evil, a reflection/victim of her mother's narcissism. All this and much more as Three Pines envelopes Gamache and the reader for another stunning mystery. Sure, nobody liked CC, but who hated her enough—and had the expertise—to pull off something like that? The dear old thing had hidden depths, courtesy of an author whose deceptively simple style masks the complex patterns of a well-devised plot.Disgusted, Clara hastens inside to the book launch for her neighbor, Ruth Zardo, the bitter but brilliant old poet whose friends from Three Pines turn up to support her. Gamache tells Lemieux, “All the mistakes I’ve made have been because I’ve assumed something and then acted as though it was fact. We are in the midst of a "polar vortex" currently so I could relate to the author's description of the brutal winter weather. She has also created a richly-imagined setting in the charming Canadian village of Three Pines, which is located somewhere just south of Montreal. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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. If you've watched the TV series, you'll know it's loosely based on books 1-4 and is highly embellished with a side story of indigenous folk, who don't appear in the books. But he has enemies of his own, and as he is frozen out of decision-making in the Surete du Quebec, he has to decide who he can trust. The psychological analysis is all wrong; people don’t act like this, even if they are completely mean. As commented in my review for the first Three Pines story, if you are looking for a gritty crime novel, this isn’t it - but, if you enjoy, for example, Agatha Christie or Ellie Griffiths, then this should fit the bill for you.I know that I started reading the galleys on the train on a Tuesday night, then continued on Wednesday morning, when we always have our editorial meetings. 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! While not known personally to Gamache or his wife, her presence in Montreal’s downtown core could not be missed. Had CC de Poitiers known the end was near she might have been at work instead of in the cheapest room the Ritz in Montreal had to offer. There are so many clues hidden in plain sight in A Fatal Grace , I lost count at 6 or 7 (all of which I missed the first time through).

While the deceased CC de Poitiers sounds like a real nasty person but I’m interested in seeing her murderer brought to justice nonetheless. By the same token, people do exist who struggle to be generous, compassionate, kind and loving, who ignore homeless people and then feel bad about it and go back to bring them coffee -- but they don't get epiphanies as a result, and they don't have an admiring audience constantly thinking about how wonderful they are.

The Three Pines characters, now seen through Gamache's eyes and not forced to make it on their own, regained their gloss. He flipped through the other pages and slowly felt a smile come to his frozen face and move to his hardened heart. Highly recommended for those who want a ‘quieter’ murder mystery with tons of Canadiana embedded in the narrative.