A Fatal Grace: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel: 2

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In the end the text reduces Crie to the symbol of her mother's evil, a reflection/victim of her mother's narcissism. There’s a lot of references to film and literature, so it’s a literary mystery; Gamache watches The Lion in Winter--there’s a Richard Lion in the story--we reference Eleanor of Aquitane, and Leonard Cohen!

Gamache is furious to see her, and knows that his enemies at Headquarters are still working against him. Obnoxious, cruel, -she was maddeningly bad news- to the people who knew who she was, but did not reveal the secret. There are some red herrings that I fell for and while I did correctly guess a few pieces of this one, I didn’t have all of the pieces figured out. This is the second book in the series and the second that I've read, in both cases because the book was selected by one of the book clubs to which I belong. 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.Chapters 1-21: The first lines of A Fatal Grace foretell the death of the nastiest woman in Three Pines: “Had CC de Poitiers known she was going to be murdered she might have bought her husband, Richard, a Christmas gift….

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. Louise Penny has become a firm favorite in the murder mystery genre and I just loved to be home in the Three Pines village of Quebec again with all the characters welcoming me. And for a while it seemed that it was only the characters who were being cruel but then I read this passage about a 12 year old girl.Had CC de Poitiers known she was going to be murdered she might have bought her husband, Richard, a Christmas gift. Sayers and Agatha Christie, drew up a list of rules for crime fiction that included the following: “No clue that is important to the solution of the puzzle may be concealed from the reader. 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. Gamache treats her with some basic human decency -- putting a coat around her when she's cold, encouraging her to eat despite her mother's death -- and the book treats this as behaviour that's so saintly it bewilders onlookers, who can't understand how anyone could bother to put a coat on a cold child's shoulders.

Penny uses not only the peaceful Eastern Townships as her setting, but continues to provide the reader with some great character development of Armand Gamache, a man whose intellect is balanced with a compassionate side. Read book 4 before 2 and 3 because I was caught at an airport with only A Rule Against Murder to dive into, so now I shall take up the slack.

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In doing so, Penny has attracted a legion of enthusiastic readers who, apparently, can hardly wait for each new installment of the series to appear. The only part of this book that I found a bit off-key was a moment between Gamache and one of the town's oldest residents, Em. I remember how thrilling it was when she did win—but what I had forgotten, until Louise mentioned it recently, was that the awards banquet happened to fall on my birthday.

Oh, and her house is full of not only Czech but any other random eastern european relatives, because Czech, Polish, Russian, Hungarian are just all the fucking same? 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. It’s a perfect setting for the last job Saul intends to do for CC, who wants pictures of herself “frolicking among the natives at Christmas. Highly recommend if you're in the mood for a fast easy-to-read crime-mystery with well-developed recurring characters (each with their own secrets) that you get to know better with each installment.