I didn’t finish this one in time for Canada Day but at least the call for Canada Day reviews provided the push for me to finally read this one. It’s weird because I loved the first Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novel but haven’t felt the need to plow through it in the way that I basically binged through the Sebastian St. Cyr series. I certainly had trepidations coming into this one because narfna’s review highlighted issues that were already showing signs of developing (for me […]
Couldn’t Find a More Deserving Victim
While this novel was still good, I was not quite as enamored with this one as with Still Life. I think it took too long to get to the murder. The novel introduces Cecilia “CC” de Poitiers on the first page, and states within the first paragraph that she would be the murder victim, but Penny spent quite a while with CC and her other characters before actually getting around to killing CC. I was anxiously awaiting her death because she was horrible, and I […]
“It’s our secrets that make us sick.”
This book bored and frustrated me for the first third, and then something turned and the plot and interesting character stuff got going, and my annoyances were subsumed under actual interest for the characters and story. Subsumed is a fun word to use by the way. Do they still sell Word of the Day toilet paper? I heard about that one time but never investigated further. So when I say that I was frustrated, I mean that I seriously contemplated not continuing with the series. […]
A Portrait with Surprising Depths
With fourteen books so far to the series, it’s not surprising that I feel like I have heard the Chief Inspector Gamache novels come up a bit. As the first novel in the series, I fully expected this to be a mediocre to decent novel, the usual first effort of a series where the author shows glimpses of the brilliance to come while also still finding her feet. As a result, I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I liked this novel! First off, […]



