A Fatal Grace: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel: 2

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Not her quiet husband, not her spineless lover, not her pathetic daughter—and certainly none of the residents of Three Pines. 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. We also get a bunch of pretentious drivel about art and poetry that is supposed to be profound somehow, but on closer look it is just as half-baked as the rest. Myrna looked out the window and wondered whether their peace, so fragile and precious, was about to be shattered. This patchwork quilt of personalities keeps the story from getting too dreary, though Penny does offer much in the way of backstory and character development, such that I am going to have to keep things straight to learn all their nuances.

In this case, a particularly unpleasant woman is murdered in a very complicated and public way while attending a curling match. I am enjoying the early stages of my Louise Penny binge, having found something that is not only unique, but captivating in its descriptive power.I happen to have a special feeling for this book, A Fatal Grace, since it’s the first book I read in the series, and got me introduced to the village of Three Pines and Armand Gamache of the Montreal Surete and his crew. Meanwhile, Gamache is astonished when Clara proudly shows him the Li Bien ornament Peter gave her for Christmas, which is exactly like the ball CC supposedly used as the basis for her garbled philosophy. There is no shortage of potential suspects and the murder of a homeless woman in Montreal appears to have ties to both CC and Three Pines.

At the same time, he is assisting in another totally unrelated murder, that of a street person who is killed in Montreal. The village of Three Pines and its stubborn, gentle (and occasionally murderous) folk who insist on living in a place that would kill you if you ran out of firewood. Inspector Gamache is just a bit too perfect and life in the little snow-globe village of Three Pines is just a bit too saccharine for my taste. a curling lesson that convinces even Beauvoir, who has always scoffed at curling as a sport, that it’s a lot harder than it looks. As a reader, I was cheering for Gamache to solve the crime, but not because of the unlikeable CC de Poiters.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. This time it was the day after Christmas, the deadly winter was raging, and more people would die than ever imagined. Opening: Had CC de Poitiers known she was going to be murdered she might have bought her husband, Richard, a Christmas gift.

CC is talk of the town, though not for anything she has done, even though she’d be happy to espouse her new-age way of living. CC humiliates Crie about her weight and her clothes, but the narrative does the same, lingering over scenes of Crie's suffering and commenting constantly on her obesity. 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. 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. Louise Penny's writing is intricate, beautiful and compelling' PETER JAMESThere is more to solving a crime than following the clues.I have finished up my two go to detective series and have been looking for a long running one for awhile now. At fifty-two Saul Petrov was just beginning to notice his friends weren't quite as brilliant, not quite as clever, not quite as slim as they once were.