Author: Louise Penny
Genre: Fiction (detective, mystery, suspense)
For the last 10 years or so, I’ve been reading through the Louise Penny novels featuring her detective, Chief Inspector of Homicide Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec in Canada. There are 14 novels in the group now, and I’ve fallen in love with the characters and watched them grow and change over the years. While each book covers a self-contained story of detective fiction, there is an overall progression in the books as a series more like the Harry Potter novels or your favorite weekly TV drama.
What’s so special about these books? Let me count the ways. If you want to get away, what’s farther from Central Florida than the little village of Three Pines, Quebec? Many of the stories take place in the winter, and the descriptions of snow and the cold are the perfect escape from July and August in Lake Nona. Almost all of the books are set in Three Pines, so we become familiar with the villagers: the retired psychologist Myrna Landers who runs a local used bookstore; the elderly and quirky poet laureate of Quebec, Ruth Zardo; Olivier Brulé and Garbi Dubau, who own and run the bistro; and Inspector Jean Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s second-in-command.
Penny plays with the ideas of light and dark in her titles, in the psychological underpinnings of her characters, and in the telling of the mysteries themselves. Light and dark are much more evident in a place as far north as Québec, where there are so many more hours of daylight in the summer and so many more hours of darkness in the winter.
Each of these novels centers around solving a murder. But sleuthing is only a tiny bit of what Gamache does. He is no ordinary detective and, indeed, not even a run-of-the-mill fictional detective. I have heard him referred to as more of a college-professor-type than a police detective. He is slow and sometimes frustrating in his deliberations and questioning letting some who appear to be suspects go free after questioning when others assume they would be arrested. He is even gracious and kindly. But he is most certainly no fool.
In addition to the individual murder mystery in each book, there is an overarching menace from inside the Sureté du Québec that weaves its way through all the books. So, while Gamache is fighting evil one book at a time, Louise Penny is giving us the opportunity to see evil being fought on a much larger scale. In the end, each murder is solved, but also, in the end, we are still concerned about Gamache and his larger ethical/moral struggle. So, good and evil play more than one role in this group of books.
