A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Gamache)

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And for a while it seemed that it was only the characters who were being cruel but then I read this passage about a 12 year old girl. C. de Poitiers, a woman so vile and insufferable no one is sorry when she is electrocuted in a freakish "accident" during a Christmas curling match at Three Pines. At the same time, he is assisting in another totally unrelated murder, that of a street person who is killed in Montreal. When they arrive in one of the surrounding towns, the body of CC de Poitiers has been found, electrocuted.

This time, one of the most hated villagers is electrocuted in the middle of a frozen lake during a curling match and nobody seems to have seen anything and at first sight the crime seems impossible. 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.

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.

I also marvel that someone like me, who is at least as much of a skeptic as Jean-Guy Beauvoir, can find myself wondering about such mysteries as lemon meringue pie.

Come sempre il villaggio di Three Pines e i suoi abitanti sono al centro della narrazione e aiutano Gamache a risolvere il mistero. A Fatal Grace is the 2nd in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamach series by Louise Penny and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Who could have been insane enough to try such a macabre method of murder--or brilliant enough to succeed?

Although Louise Penny’s novels feature some rather nasty murders, I would classify her Inspector Gamache murder mysteries as cosy crime, especially as there are some lovely descriptions of situation and setting and some wonderful descriptions of food(! This time it was the day after Christmas, the deadly winter was raging, and more people would die than ever imagined.The beauty of Louise Penny's auspicious debut novel, Still Life , is that it's composed entirely of grace notes, all related to the central mystery of who shot an arrow into the heart of Miss Jane Neal. Even the revelation that she's intelligent, cunning, and desperate enough to have arranged her mother's ingenious murder is shown hand-in-hand with a portrayal of her in a catatonic fantasy not altogether different from CC's own narcissistic delusions. 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.