A Fatal Grace: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel: 2

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In the Sunday New York Times magazine (June 15, 2014), Hilary Clinton is quoted as saying she has a Louise Penny on her bedside table. Thank you again, Hope, for getting us off to an excellent start in our re-examination of A Fatal Grace, and joining in on our discussions.

There's nothing wrong with magical realism, but I felt like Three Pines and its residents had enough every day magic without resorting to the truly far out there. That Quebec cold, and a later snowstorm, are keys to the chill that runs through this otherwise kind of warm, cozy murder mystery filled with (mostly) likable locals. Don't look for the hamlet of Three Pines anywhere on a map of the countryside outside of Montreal, although Louise Penny has made the town and its residents so real. From the Dagger award winning author Louise Penny comes the second Armand Gamache mystery set in the stunning countryside of Quebec.

Welcome to winter in Three Pines, a picturesque village in Quebec, where the villagers are preparing for a traditional country Christmas, and someone is preparing for murder. Something I think is very interesting is that Gamache did something in the past that ended any upward movement of his career. I think it’s magnificent on so many levels: as a complex and masterful detective story, as a glorious character study, and as an exploration of universal hopes and fears. On Christmas Eve St Thomas’s was also filled with families, children excited and exhausted, elderly men and women who’d come to this place all their lives and sat in the same pew and worshipped the same God and baptized and married and buried those they loved. This book sealed the deal on my deciding to continue on with the series as I was nicely surprised by the second offering.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache solves more murders while surrounded by the sparkling personalities that compose the small town of Three Pines in Canada. But still she seemed to grow fuzzy, then sharp, as though he was looking through a prism at two different women, one beautiful, glamorous, vivacious, and the other a pathetic, dyed-blonde rope, all corded and wound and knotted and rough. What do you think of Ruth’s idea that “most people, while claiming to hate authority, actually yearned for someone to take charge”? In the end the text reduces Crie to the symbol of her mother's evil, a reflection/victim of her mother's narcissism. 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!I hated this book because in Penny's world everyone sorts out so neatly, and after they're sorted out what they do doesn't matter. In the midst of a killing Quebec winter, the inspector has to figure out how the woman could have been electrocuted while attending a curling match on a frozen lake. And what might 92-year-old Kaye Thompson, who was sitting next to CC at the match, have seen as she was murdered? Come sempre il villaggio di Three Pines e i suoi abitanti sono al centro della narrazione e aiutano Gamache a risolvere il mistero.