A Fatal Grace: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel: 2

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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.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté and his wife, Reine-Marie, make their first appearance in the book on the day after Christmas, when they have a tradition of reviewing unsolved cases. Clara’s joy at the Christmas windows is disrupted by a filthy pile of blankets that turns out to be a beggar throwing up. What do you think of Ruth’s idea that “most people, while claiming to hate authority, actually yearned for someone to take charge”? Having grown up in Michigan amidst many a freezing winter days, I have, and in A Fatal Grace, Louise Penny truly brings a chilling winter alive making the reader feel you are at the enchanted snowy village of Three Pines in Quebec. CC lived, Saul knew, in her own world, where she was perfect, where she could hide her feelings and hide her failings.

Maybe because he speaks French but Armand Gamache in figuring out clues before his team of detectives reminds me of a modern Hercule Poirot. The tiny hamlet is populated by a cast of quirky but mostly lovable characters who spend a lot of time walking through the snow and curling up in front of blazing fires. There are some red herrings that I fell for and while I did correctly guess a few pieces of this one, I didn’t have all of the pieces figured out. I couldn’t figure out how Elle knew about Clara’s work, to tell Clara, “I’ve always loved your work Clara”.

Come sempre il villaggio di Three Pines e i suoi abitanti sono al centro della narrazione e aiutano Gamache a risolvere il mistero. He'd take deep dark breaths of the night air, trying to reassure himself that the stifled yawn of his dinner companion was because of the wine or the magret de canard or the warmth in the Montreal restaurant, wrapped as they were in their sensible winter sweaters.

The writing is beautiful, poetic in places, and it managed to transport me to the snow covered Three Pines, a place I plan to revisit soon. For example, Clara and Peter, her husband, are still fighting, but about different subjects now than from the last book. In fact in one way or another, CC has deeply upset many of the inhabitants of the small Canadian village of Three Pines, so when she is murdered during the Boxing Day curling match, no one seems particularly sorry and several people appear to have a very good motive for wishing to see the back of her.

In busi¬¨ness meetings, dinners, taxi rides through the snowy streets of Montreal, CC'd suddenly bend down and emerge triumphant, holding her creation as though another virgin birth. This book sealed the deal on my deciding to continue on with the series as I was nicely surprised by the second offering. What woke Saul Petrov at two in the morning, and whispered in his ears in the voice that had warned him as a child that lions lived under his bed, was the certainty that people now found him boring. I am enjoying the early stages of my Louise Penny binge, having found something that is not only unique, but captivating in its descriptive power. Each morning he'd wake early and go into the young day, when the world was new and anything was possible, and he'd see how lovely Montreal was.They usually have thick cables with orange rubber coating, and the clips are massive, not little bitty alligator clips. Perhaps this is due in part to the approaching Christmas festivities, but certainly the removal of the town ‘bully’ must have something to do with the cheer. He'd see people smiling at each other as they got their cappuccinos at the café, or their fresh flowers or their baguettes.

Having learned that CC de Poitiers, who claimed to be the daughter of Eleanor and Henri de Poitiers, invented both her name and her past (Eleanor de Poitiers, better known as Eleanor of Aquitaine, actually died in 1204), Gamache needs to find out who CC really was. For example, when the whole village finds out what a beautiful voice CC’s daughter has, she proceeds to completely annihilate her in front of everyone. So it should come as no surprise that when CC is electrocuted in the middle of a frozen lake, in front of the entire village, as she watched the annual curling tournament no one is grieving too much or that her shocking death was no accident. He does solve the murder, and connects it with another murder in the city of Montreal, with the help of his dedicated team of excellent investigators. We also get a bunch of pretentious drivel about art and poetry that is supposed to be profound somehow, but on closer look it is just as half-baked as the rest.I wanted her to get her comeuppance as a thoroughly evil woman rather than achieve a kind of victime status. sure to create great reader demand for more stories featuring civilized and articulate Chief Inspector Gamache. I guessed the murderer early on, but I get the feeling that whodunnit is less important to these books than the local color, the ambience, the sweet community. Not her quiet husband, not her spineless lover, not her pathetic daughter—and certainly none of the residents of Three Pines. 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.