A Fatal Grace: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel: 2

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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! Her underarms bulged and flopped and the rolls of her waist made the skintight dress look like a melting strawberry ice cream. She and her handsome husband, Peter, have been starving artists in Three Pines for years, although his precisely detailed paintings have finally started to sell.

With each breath his nostrils froze shut and the air was like an ice pack in his sinuses, shooting pain through his forehead and making his eyes tear and freeze. Watching her caress her book with more tenderness than she'd ever shown when caressing him, he wondered whether her ice water insides had somehow seeped into him, perhaps during sex, and were slowly freezing him. While the deceased CC de Poitiers sounds like a real nasty person but I’m interested in seeing her murderer brought to justice nonetheless. He'd see people smiling at each other as they got their cappuccinos at the café, or their fresh flowers or their baguettes. In the midst of a killing Quebec winter, the inspector has to figure out how the woman could have been electrocuted while attending a curling match on a frozen lake.Here it’s the kind of weather when you find yourself stripped down to barely acceptable clothing and opening the fridge or freezer a little more often than necessary. For all the perplexing mechanics of the murder, and the snowed-in village setting, this is not the usual "cosy" or even a traditional mystery. Thank you again, Hope, for getting us off to an excellent start in our re-examination of A Fatal Grace, and joining in on our discussions. Consider the lines (from “A Sad Child,” by Margaret Atwood”): “Well, all children are sad / but some get over it.

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. This', she sliced her book violently in the air like an ancient mythical hammer, heading for an unforgiving anvil, 'will teach people how to find happiness. Gamache was the best of them, the smartest and bravest and strongest because he was willing to go into his own head alone, and open all the doors there, and enter all the dark rooms. This is the second of what is now a long series about this big, gentle, intellectual man and his various sidekicks and offsiders. As for Nichol being somewhat akin to the Hadley House, as you wrote in your post, I’m not quite sure what you mean.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. Maybe because he speaks French but Armand Gamache in figuring out clues before his team of detectives reminds me of a modern Hercule Poirot. Anyone with a single brain cell would see jumper cables clipped to a metal chair and their alarm bells would deafen everybody in the town. When I’m asked what makes her books so great, I usually fall back on a quote from Emily Dickinson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. I don't mean that to sound as dismissive as it probably does, and again, I understand that there are large numbers of readers who would love to live in Three Pines, but I'd probably go stark raving mad in less than a week.

Had CC de Poitiers known the end was near she might have been at work instead of in the cheapest room the Ritz in Montreal had to offer. What it comes down to, I guess, is that I'm just one of those people who would much rather spend a night hanging out with Matt and Mick Ballou, drinking a good Irish whiskey at Grogan's Open House than I would sitting around a pleasant fire at the bistro in Three Pines, drinking a nice hot chocolate. Whether or not a character is good or bad is shown by whether they adore Gamache for his goodness, like Beauvoir, or dislike and distrust it, like Nichols. By the time I got to that meeting, I couldn’t stop talking about how amazing Louise was, except perhaps to ignore everyone else and keep reading more of the story. Although I am well behind many in reading Louise Penny’s series, i enjoyed my first visit to Three Pines making this an easy choice for vacation reading.

It is a book in which the values the story claims to be promoting (compassion, love, generosity, respect for human dignity) are actually entirely undercut by the text itself.

What do you make of Gamache’s relationships with the different members of his team, from Beauvoir to Nichol?And how saintly Gamache is, even though I can’t see it, because Penny tells me, but does not show it. She lives in a fake world of delusions of grandeur and any time she can bring someone down, for even the most trivial or no reason, she's going to do it. With his trademark compassion and courage, Gamache digs beneath the idyllic surface of village life to find the dangerous secrets long buried there.