Armand Gamache is Chief Inspector of the Sûreté du Québec, the province’s criminal investigation division. He is a patient man for the most part, solidly grounded in his circle of family and friends, secure in many years of police experience and knowledgeable about the English and French-speaking people of his province.
In the little town of Three Pines, a body is found in the bistro of Olivier Brulé. Gamache discovers that the murdered man was a hermit who lived in a log cabin in the woods. The murder was clearly committed in the cabin, but the body, it turns out, was first carried to a newly-renovated house outside the village and dumped there before it showed up in Olivier’s bistro. This bizarre game of shifting the body around points to a festering rivalry among the village hoteliers.
Examining the cabin, Gamache is astonished to find that the hermit used priceless glass and china for his meals, and his bookshelves are packed with first editions of famous authors. Moreover, the hermit was a woodcarver, and his elaborate and unsettling carvings, Gamache knows, hold much of the secret of his death.
But before he can discover the truth, Gamache has to employ an art expert and a code expert, and he has to journey to the Queen Charlotte Islands, where Canada’s premier artist Emily Carr painted the Haida Indians and their totem poles.
Louise Penny tells the story slowly and allusively, invoking the poetry of Margaret Atwood and Mike Freeman. She can be quite funny, and I believe she invented a character whose first name is Havoc just so Gamache can ask his mother to call him and we can have this line: “’Havoc!,’ his mother cried, letting the dogs slip out as she called into the woods.”
The meals are described with loving care, and you don’t want to be hungry when you’re reading this book: eggs Benedict, escargot in garlic butter, pear with prosciutto, minted sweetpea soup, cauliflower and Stilton soup, a fruit-stuffed Rock Cornish game hen cooked on a spit, a lamb and prune tagine, shrimp and fennel salad, boeuf bourguignon. You get the idea.
Louise Penny, a Toronto native who worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before becoming a successful, prize-winning crime novelist, now lives in a small village south of Montreal, which is the way Three Pines is described in the book. Still Life was the first of the Armand Gamache series, published in 2007. Penny uses art and artists frequently in the books of the Gamache series, in which The Brutal Telling is the fifth. If you like beautiful settings, art, food, and murder, you’ll like this one.
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