Thursday, September 29, 2011

Is It Real, or Just a Trick of the Light?

One of the innumerable joys a book can give is the ability to travel around the world without TSA pat downs.  That's not to say I don't love to experience new places, I DO, but not having unlimited time or finances forces one to pick and choose.  For instance, I would love to visit Quebec, but I would probably choose to go to Hawaii. I'm just saying. Fortunately, Louise Penny can take me on a French Canadian tour every time she writes a new Chief Inspector Gamache novel, and I was not disappointed by the scenery in A Trick of the Light.

Chief Inspector Gamache is the head of homicide at the Surete du Quebec, but he seems to spend much of his time investigating crimes in the tiny village of Three Pines, where murder could be a special on the menu at the local bistro. Despite its surfeit of dead bodies, (this is the 7th Inspector Gamache novel), Three Pines is a lovely, hidden village full of lovely people, but most of them do have something to hide. And when Clara the artist has a life changing show, all of the hidden jealousies and resentments appear at the museum, but only one ends up with a broken neck in her garden.  It is up to Inspector Gamache to separate the real from the imagined, to see beyond mere tricks of the light.

I loved Louis Penny's A Trick of the Light.  If you'd like to investigate her books yourself, I'd start at the beginning. Here is the list:

Still Life
A Fatal Grace
The Cruelest Month
A Rule Against Murder
A Brutal Telling
Bury Your Dead


Bonjour!

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