Storymusing on The Black Wolf: A Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novel by Louise Penny

 

The Black Wolf

by Louise Penny

Our theme for my book club in February was “Enemies” and this book fits that bill to a T. The question of just who the enemy is, and if there are multiple, reverberates throughout the book.

This is the 20^th book in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. Most of the series builds on previous story lines, but Penny does a great job of building in back information so that you won’t feel adrift if you pick up this book out of order.

In the last book, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his senior agents Beauvoir and Lacoste thought they had uncovered the extent of a terrible plot to poison the water of Montreal and arrested the responsible parties. But is there more? Did they get the right person? Was that even the end game?

The three are in agreement, We have a problem.

As Gamache’s deafness and the ringing in his ears continue to plague him, clouding both his communication and thinking, he has just two notebooks and a few numbers on a tattered map of Quebec to lead him forward.

The three dig deeper into the evidence they have and what it means. They discover there are deeper layers beneath the dark web of the Internet. Down deep where the conspiracies thrive and multiply, there is more danger than they could have anticipated. And more meanings in the notebooks and map that a young biologist left behind for them.

Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff  is clearly meeting with crime boss Don Joseph Moretti and he is clearly involved in every bit of crime his syndicate can control, but where does she really stand?

The prime minster seems to know more than what he is saying and a friend in the U.S. military is also struggling with what to tell them without becoming a traitor to his own country.

Thankfully, Gamache is surrounded by the warmth and love of all his friends and family in the Quebec village of Three Pines. There is definite comic relief here from the elderly poet Ruth Zardo and her swearing duck, Rosa. There’s a parallel quest for clarity in the form of painter Clara Morrow as she attempts to create a painting that captures the moment just before something momentous happens.

As Gamache’s hearing suddenly becomes clear like a moment of insight, the revelations come in fits and starts and backtracks, like a rabbit running around a snowy hillside.

For me, this book tethers us in the village of Three Pines as it explores the darkest part of what conspiracy theories and power brokers are doing. I love the style and pacing of the book. It’s a relaxing read even though the story has a great deal of tension.

I would highly recommend it and I even might read it again, or at least listen to it on audio.

Storymusing Review: The Grey Wolf: A Novel by Louise Penny

 

The Grey Wolf: A Novel

by Louise Penny

November’s theme for our book club was “places you’d like to visit.” I’m afraid I didn’t so much look for books that fit that theme, taking me outside my comfort zone, as pick books I wanted to read anyway that were set in places I wouldn’t mind visiting.

British village? Yes, please. The Murders in Great Diddling by Katarina Bivald fit right in. I listened to that one on my commute and had many a laugh out of it. The characters were unique and quirky, bringing humorous twists to the traditional murder mystery. I highly recommend it.

My main read, The Grey Wolf: A Novel by Louise Penny, is set in Canada, throughout many parts of the countryside and Montreal, plus has characters flying off to Washington D.C. and Europe. I couldn’t have chosen a more perfect book for our theme if I tried.

I have wanted to read The Grey Wolf for a month, but it’s hard to get your hands on a copy in my library, digital or print. However, I was in a little village near home with my daughter and decided to stop in at the library there while we were killing time waiting for the farm store to open. Their display of books held not one, but two copies of The Grey Wolf. Small libraries for the win!

I’ve been reading in hard print whenever I can lately to help me unwind so I happily checked one out and sat down in my chair with a cup of coffee to start reading right after lunch.

The book begins with short chapters. I found each scene to be an individual puzzle piece with a certain color or pattern, defining a certain plotline or subplot of the story. As I read on, new chapters attached another piece to the puzzle until it all took on a shape and began to make sense.

Though the village in the story, Three Pines, is fictional, I love visiting there each time a new book comes out. It sounds so peaceful, with the village bistro for community and the little church to sit in and reflect.

The story opens in the village with our hero, Armand Gamache, head of the Surete in Quebec, relaxing in his garden with his wife, Reine-Marie.

A persistent caller that Armand does not want to speak to provokes him and our favorite village residents are soon drawn into the story. There’s the old poet Ruth and her swearing duck, the retired psychologist / bookstore owner Myrna, Gabri and Olivier who own the bistro, and the artist Clara. (Though I will say that Clara finding candy in her hair and actually eating it is a little off putting. But maybe that’s just me.)

Gamache is also surrounded by his family as the story progresses, with his daughter and son plus their families. There’s his trusty co-workers Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabel Lacoste.

Many important characters from past stories are revisited in this book, but not all in the capacity that we’ve known them. I was so disappointed in the choices some characters ended up making, characters we had once loved. But that is the crux of the story.

One of the biggest difficulties for Gamache in this book is knowing who to trust and who not to trust. Who are the bad guys? It’s not a new situation for him, but it’s a painful one at times.

How far will someone go? Do the ends justify the means? And keeping fear from leading to inaction is one of the biggest tests people often face.

One of my favorite parts of the book begins rather abruptly with Jean-Guy saying, “Oh God, oh God, oh shit.”

A pilot has insisted it’s okay to take off but now Armand and Jean-Guy are in a small plane flying through a storm and afraid they aren’t going to make it. The pilot isn’t sure anymore either.

The handling of the subplot for about thirty-five pages, intertwined with the rest of the story, the tension, feels like a masterful touch to draw the reader onward.

I adore the little bits of French that are sprinkled throughout the text, and the reminders that though we’re reading in English, they often aren’t speaking in English.

The pacing is not frenetic but it does move at a good clip. I think part of that is the judicious use of a variety of sentence lengths and the fact that there are tensions falling and rising, keeping the characters on their toes. I can’t stand stories where the tension rises and rises but nothing ever happens. Penny has things happen that the characters have to work through. She puts the characters in hot water and we see how they struggle and emerge, usually changed in some way.

I highly recommend this book. Three Pines is a wonderful place to visit.

Bury Your Dead: A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery: Book 6 by Louise Penny

 

Bury Your Dead: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel – Book 6

by Louise Penny

This is a pivotal book in this series,. It begins with the fallout from a horrible situation.

To be honest, reading it on the Kindle, the formatting isn’t clear as to whether the first few pages are meant to be a scene then we fast forward to present time, or whether it’s a flashback to the event. There is no italics to indicate a flashback, but neither is there a chapter heading or clear page break, just an extra line, before the beginning of the present day narrative. I’d say Penny intended for us to be totally present in that first scene, which took place before the events of the book.

And the scene is fairly simple – Chief Inspector Gamache, his second in command, Beauvoir, and a team are geared up, armed, and trying to retrieve a hostage. That much is clear, but who the hostage is, remains a mystery for a bit. As the details dripped in, I worried for Beauvoir. Then Gamache is sitting with his mentor and former chief, Emile Comeau, over breakfast in a Quebec City café.

This book is a masterful work of men recovering from an operation gone wrong, both mentally and physically. We get the information about what happened sprinkled throughout the book in flashbacks, until the full picture has been developed. At the same time, Gamache is caught up in a murder that has taken place in the library of the historical society where he has been spending time.

An historian, Renaud, who was obsessed with finding the body of Samuel de Champlain, has been murdered and buried in the cellar of the library. Was he on to something in finding Champlain? Why was he killed, and by whom?

Penny gives us a portrait of the city, with fascinating details and beauty, and a picture of political tension between French and English descendants that is equally fascinating. She brings in just the right amount of history to explain things without bogging down the narrative.

There are tiny little mysteries too, like why one character never speaks above a nearly inaudible whisper.

But there is another mystery running concurrently, one we might have thought was finished in the last book. Did Olivier really kill the hermit in Three Pines? Gamache had come to believe so, had provided enough evidence to have him convicted. Had he made a mistake? He asks Beauvoir to go to Three Pines and try to prove the opposite, that Olivier did not kill the hermit. Beauvoir thinks it’s a waste of time but he cannot refuse his Chief so he goes and throws his heart into it. At the same time, he is working on his own healing because he was shot in the raid, and the people of Three Pines help him in strange ways with both.

The characters in this book are wonderfully unique. It’s like the Island of Misfit Toys. One of my favorites is Ruth Zardo, an elderly poet who is more rude to you, the more she likes you.  

There is so much going on in this book, but all the elements – the raid gone wrong, the re-investigation of the Hermit’s murder, the historian’s murder in Quebec, the historical and present day tensions between the descendants of English and French, the mental and emotional healing of the two detectives - are braided together masterfully. It is truly an impressive book.

If you like mysteries at all, I highly recommend this series, and this book in particular.

Book Review: Still Life by Louise Penny

 

Still Life

by Louise Penny

I was recently recommended this series by one of our Friends of the Library. I’ve heard of Louise Penny books. I’ve had readers call the library for them on many occasions. I was not disappointed.

This is book one in a long running series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Quebec, a family man, in his mid-fifties, and the head of homicide. He is called to the village of Three Pines when a woman is found dead in the woods, possibly due to an arrow, though the arrow is gone.

“People don’t see it coming, because the murderer is a master at image, at the false front, at presenting a reasonable, even placid exterior. But it masked a horror underneath. And that’s why the expression he saw most on the faces of victims wasn’t fear, wasn’t anger. It was surprise.”

This is a police procedural and the reader is taken along for every step of the way, from Gamache sitting in the village square watching life go on around them, to meetings with his staff.

“Three Pines wasn’t on any tourist map, being too far off any main or even secondary road. Like Narnia, it was generally found unexpectedly and with a degree of surprise that such an elderly village should have been hiding in this valley all along. Anyone fortunate enough to find it once usually found their way back.” It’s a fanciful description, but I can picture it. I’ve been through some villages like that in the Catskills of Upstate New York. The details really put me there.

The authors characterization and detail is excellent. “One of the boys laughed… not a funny laugh… It’s the sound boys make when they’re hurting something and enjoying it. Jane shivered at the recollection…”

The characters may be, to some extent, types but they seem very unique and well differentiated to me. I had no trouble keeping track of who was who and how they fit into the story.

I enjoyed the subtle humor. Gamache is called away and his wife goes to a baptism on her own. “She was almost certain she was at the right baptism, though she didn’t recognize all that many people.”

And there are wonderful bits, like when Peter is comforting his wife Clara after her friend Jane has died. “And he realized that, had he died in the woods, Clara would have had Jane to comfort her.  And Jane would have known what to do. In that instant a door opened for Peter. For the first time in his life, he asked what someone else would do. What would Jane do if she was here and he was dead? And he had his answer. Silently he lay down beside Clara and wrapped himself around her. And for the first time since getting the news, her heart and mind calmed.” I found that just beautiful. It is the author’s insight and observations that make this book so lovely to read.

I always appreciate it when characters perceptions of someone else, or a situation, change over the course of the story. They find out they were wrong about something. That plays a big part in this story.

My one criticism involves a slightly odd and one-dimensional depiction of a young female officer who seemingly can’t get over herself. Nothing is her fault and people just can’t see how brilliant she is. I suppose there are people like that out there, but I’ve seen far more people with a lack of confidence at that age than this attitude. It just didn’t ring true for me. It seemed to be an artifice, a simplistic foil for the magnificence of the great Armand Gamache, to show us how saintly he is. I really don’t think it was necessary.

For example, “Nichol pledged to keep her opinions to herself if that was the thanks she got for having the courage to say what everyone was thinking. When asked directly she’d answer in monosyllables. So there.”

The “So there” is a shade too far. It turns the character into a childish caricature instead of someone simply a little bit too egotistical. Thankfully, it only intrudes on an otherwise nearly perfect murder mystery at a few points in the story.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I’ll definitely be reading more in this series.