The Cruelest Month: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel Author: Visit Amazon's Louise Penny Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0312573502 | Format: EPUB
The Cruelest Month: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel Description
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Chief Insp. Armand Gamache and his team investigate another bizarre crime in the tiny Québec village of Three Pines in Penny's expertly plotted third cozy (after 2007's
A Fatal Grace). As the townspeople gather in the abandoned and perhaps haunted Hadley house for a séance with a visiting psychic, Madeleine Favreau collapses, apparently dead of fright. No one has a harsh word to say about Madeleine, but Gamache knows there's more to the case than meets the eye. Complicating his inquiry are the repercussions of Gamache having accused his popular superior at the Sûreté du Québec of heinous crimes in a previous case. Fearing there might be a mole on his team, Gamache works not only to solve the murder but to clear his name. Arthur Ellis Award–winner Penny paints a vivid picture of the French-Canadian village, its inhabitants and a determined detective who will strike many Agatha Christie fans as a 21st-century version of Hercule Poirot.
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Review
“Gamache is a prodigiously complicated and engaging hero, destined to become one of the classic detectives.”
---Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The cozy mystery has a graceful practitioner in Louise Penny.”
---The New York Times Book Review
“Don’t look for the hamlet of Three Pines anywhere on a map . . . although Louise Penny has made the town and its residents so real . . . that you might just try to find it.”
---The Chicago Tribune
“[A Fatal Grace] is not the usual ‘cosy’ or even a traditional puzzle mystery. It’s a finely written, intelligent, and observant book.”
---The Houston Chronicle
“A remarkable new writer . . . Louise Penny arrives with flair, humanity, and intrigue in her debut novel, Still Life. . . . Elegant writing alone would not carry this remarkable book; Penny also creates a puzzle worthy of the masters. But more important, she studies issues of good and evil, of human nature, of human kindness, and human cruelty.”
---The Richmond Times-Dispatch
“This cerebral mystery . . . is a rare treat.”
---People on Still Life
See all Editorial Reviews
- Series: Chief Inspector Gamache Novels (Book 3)
- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Minotaur Books; Reprint edition (April 12, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312573502
- ISBN-13: 978-0312573508
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Book Club Review
The Cruelest Month
Louise Penny
Our book club's book for March was THE CRUELEST MONTH, by Louise Penny. We decided on this book because it intersected two themes we have been thinking about reading. The first one was wanting to read a "cozy." The second was wanting to reading something either written by a Canadian or set in Canada. (We were talking about how close Canada is, and yet how little we really know about it. We have also read other Canadian mysteries, and have enjoyed them.)
This is (it turns out) the third in a series set in the fictional Quebec town of Three Pines. A beloved local resident--a cancer survivor who fled life in the big city for something more simple--dies during a seance, which takes place in the town's "haunted house." The investigative team led by Armand Gamache is called in to figure out what has happened. Was it murder? Can you literally scare someone to death? In the meantime, Gamache--who has blown the whistle on some terrible goings-on in the department--is the target of a cruel vendetta that seeks to ruin him, his family, and his career.
In some ways Three Pines is a sort of Quebecois version of St. Mary Mead, complete with all the delightful businesses and local characters that one expects in a cozy. But Three Pines is an update of that typical village; the author works hard at making the cast overtly "diverse," including a much-beloved and accepted gay couple and a black woman who runs the local bookstore. The investigation does proceed very slowly, with a psychologically perceptive but somehow not very satisfying conclusion.
This was a book that, as a club, we felt we really wanted to like, but we were left feeling disappointed, underwhelmed even.
A murder during a séance? It sounds a bit over the top, even as the centerpiece of a mystery novel. But if the author is Louise Penny and the investigator is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec provincial police, what may seem tiresomely gothic proves to be anything but.
In this third volume of Penny's Gamache mysteries, the Montreal-based detective revisits the tidy and obscure, but murder-prone, village of Three Pines, this time to decide if local resident Madeleine Favreau died of fright or was killed.
You can rule out fright.
As she did in the previous installment of the series, Penny mixes a stable of recurring locals with a few newcomers, including the murder victim and several potential suspects. But it is Gamache himself who is the most intriguing character in "The Cruelest Month," and the reason fans keep coming back for more. Compassionate, complex, thoughtful and a tad mystical in his outlook, Gamache is, at the same time, a seasoned pro with a stellar track record of solving murders.
Just as fascinating as the quest to identify Favreau's killer is the escalation of a behind-the-scenes campaign by conspirators within the S?reté du Quebec (as the provincial police are known) to destroy Gamache for the role he played several years earlier in bringing renegade officers to justice.
Penny first hinted at Gamache's professional troubles in "Still Life," the first book in the series, and she began filling in the missing pieces in "A Fatal Grace." But it is here that the reader's patience is rewarded with a more detailed explanation of how Gamache's principled stand fueled a drive for retribution.
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