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.

My newly birthed obsession with the creation of author Louise Penny continues with the second book in her series of novels about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, A Fatal Grace. Immediately upon finishing her debut novel, Still Life, I traveled back to the village of Three Pines. I had become so enamored of the villagers–Peter and Clara, Olivier and Gabri, Myrna, even the cruel and cantankerous poet Ruth Zardo–that I had to make a return trip. And then of course there is Armand Gamache, whose adoration for his wife Reine-Marie is matched only by the kind intelligence with which he greets the process of solving that most heinous crime: murder.

Continue reading A Fatal Grace ~Louise Penny →

It was Richard, I believe, who last autumn recommended I give the work of Louise Penny a try. It took an unexpectedly beautiful, nearly autumnal Friday morning and an unplanned stroll through my local bookstore, for the planted seed to bear fruit. I saw Still Life in the Mystery section and my desire to bring forward the anxiously awaited Fall season drove me out of the store and to the local library where I hungrily grabbed the book from the shelf. In a moment of prescience I grabbed the second book, A Fatal Grace, as well. Good job me. For I devoured Still Life in between this weekend’s planned events and when I wasn’t reading it I was either thinking about it or, as my wife can attest, talking excitedly about it. I finished it moments ago. And now she is reading it.

I’m never entirely certain how it happens, how the trajectory of a really good book (and Still Life is a really good book) intersects with ‘just the right moment’ to move reading from an act to an EXPERIENCE. I only know that it happens, and when it does reading becomes intoxicating. Still Life is the first in a series of books set in Canada, featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec. Rather than beat around the proverbial bush I’ll come out and tell you this up front: Gamache is fantastic. If characters are your passion, your passion will find its object of adoration in the characters birthed from the imagination of Louise Penny, with Gamache heading the list. But before going into that, lets talk a little bit about the story itself.

“Miss Jane Neal met her maker in the early morning mist of Thanksgiving Sunday. It was pretty much a surprise all round.”

Continue reading Still Life ~Louise Penny →